Best of the Web Today - July 7, 2004
By JAMES TARANTO
J. Danforth Edwards
John Kerry's choice of John Edwards as his running mate is reminiscent of 1988, when Vice President Bush, rejecting candidates with more "gravitas," chose a fresh-faced young senator, Dan Quayle, as his running mate. To be sure, this comparison is in some ways unfair to Quayle, who was twice as experienced as Edwards (four years in the House and eight in the Senate, vs. just six in the Senate).
But the image of callowness stuck to Quayle, and it may to Edwards as well. The Associated Press quotes a quip from Comedy Central's Jon Stewart: "Actually John Edwards was 15 when John Kerry got back from Vietnam, but yes, he was in diapers." Today's Washington Post notes that Edwards "had just graduated from North Carolina State University when Richard B. Cheney first held a senior White House position, in 1974." And yesterday the Associated Press even ran a headline that read "Teen Wins Spot at Democratic Convention."
And in the June 2003 issue of The Washington Monthly, a left-liberal magazine, Charlie Peters told a story reminiscent of the Quayle tales the media loved:
Appearing on Tim Russert's "Meet the Press" some months ago, Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.) did not display a command of the information a president should know. Was this just a bad day for the senator? We hope so, but a story recently told to me by a reliable source is less than reassuring.
One evening while he was campaigning for the Senate in North Carolina, Edwards was faced with a choice of several events he might attend. An advance man suggested, "Maybe we ought to go to the reception for Leah Rabin." Edwards responded, "Who's she?" "Yitzhak Rabin's widow," replied the aide. "Who was he?" asked Edwards.
In fairness, we should note that there's no evidence that the Rabins knew who Edwards was either.
Of course, the Quayle pick didn't end up hurting Bush much; the duo beat Michael Dukakis and Lloyd Bensen in a near landslide. Americans might not have been thrilled to have Quayle a heartbeat away from the presidency, but it was better than having a bloodless Massachusetts liberal in the actual office. Not that there's any danger of that happening this year . . .
What Would We Do Without Experts?
"Experts: VP Choices Rarely Tip Scales"--headline, Indianapolis Star, July 7
"Experts: Choice Could Swing Election"--headline, Hartford Courant, July 7
What Would We Do Without Data?
"Edwards One of the Privileged, Data Show"--headline, Associated Press, July 6
'Nuance' or Just Hypocrisy?--II
Following up on our item yesterday, liberal Boston Globe columnist Eileen McNamara blasts John Kerry's abortion hypocrisy:
If you believe that life begins at conception, doesn't your conscience compel you to vote in concert with that belief? Just as, if your conscience tells you capital punishment is state-sanctioned murder, you would vote against the death penalty? Or if you believe that gay marriage is a fundamental civil right, you would vote against a constitutional amendment to ban it?
I, and I suspect many others who support legal abortion, had mistakenly assumed that, on this very personal issue, Kerry's conscience was at odds with the teaching of his church. His consistent record in favor of abortion rights, family planning, and reproductive freedom was, I thought, a courageous reflection of an independent mind.
Now, I don't know what to think. I cannot respectfully disagree with him as I do with an abortion opponent whose conscience prompts her to work to unseat lawmakers like Kerry. I understand her. She is acting on principle, lobbying to change laws antithetical to her conscience. I don't understand him, voting consistently in opposition to what he now tells us is one of his core beliefs.
McNamara says that Betsy Cavendish, acting president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, "was offended that I wanted to discuss Kerry's abortion comments on 'such a great day.' " As Cavendish explained, "Our job is to get Bush out." One hardly expects moral seriousness from a single-issue political activist, but it isn't too much to demand of a man who wants to be president of the United States.
A Foreign Leader Against Kerry
John Kerry loves to boast about unnamed "foreign leaders" who've supposedly endorsed him, but the Associated Press reports on one who's definitely backing the incumbent. ""If the American administration changes in November, it will be catastrophic, because those Democrats do not understand a thing about foreign policy, and they lack the determination to make decisions the way [President] Bush made them in Iraq and elsewhere," says Sheik Saud Al Nasser Al Sabah, who was Kuwait's ambassador to the U.S. when the president's father led the effort that liberated Saud's country.
A Kid With an Angle
If John Edwards ends up escaping the Dan Quayle treatment, it will be in large part because the partisan liberal media stereotype Republicans only as stupid. An example of the absurd lengths to which they'll go comes from this report by the Associated Press and WFTV of Orlando, Fla. It seems that Gov. Jeb Bush was meeting with some high school students and one of them, 18-year-old Luana Marques, asked him a question about geometry:
"What are the angles on a three-four-five-triangle?"
The governor gave a steely grin and then stalled a bit. "The angles would be . . . if I was going to guess . . . Three-four-five. Three-four-five. I don't know, 125, 90 and whatever remains on 180?"
Marques had an answer, although it wasn't the right one: "It's 30-60-90."
The correct answer was 90 degrees, 53.1 degrees and 36.9 degrees, said Michelle Taylor, a graduate student in mathematics at the University of Florida, when told about the governor's pop quiz.
Now first of all, does anyone who isn't a graduate student in mathematics know the answer to this? We certainly didn't. Besides, geometry is the most useless branch of mathematics, at least in our experience. We occasionally make use of algebra, trigonometry and calculus, but we dropped our high school geometry class after a couple of months, and we've never missed it. And in the unlikely event that Gov. Bush ever does need to solve a problem like this, he can always hire Dick Morris to triangulate for him.
A Knot in November?
Conventional wisdom is that this year's presidential election will be very close, just as 2000's was. We're not sure we agree, but we'd like to raise an intriguing possibility: What if the election ends in a tie?
It could happen. In order to win in the Electoral College, a candidate needs 270 votes out of a total of 538. In 2000 George W. Bush barely exceeded this threshold, winning 271 electoral votes once the Florida dispute was resolved. But because the total number of electors is even, there exists the possibility of a 269-269 tie.
Precisely this result would have obtained had the four closest states in 2000 gone the other way--Florida (25 electoral votes) to Al Gore, and New Mexico (5), Wisconsin (11) and Iowa (7) to Bush. All these states were close enough that a shift of 5,000 votes in each would have been enough not only to change the outcome but to give the hypothetical winner a recount-proof majority.
Reapportionment has changed the electoral-vote count in the president's favor; if he and John Kerry carry exactly the same states that he and Gore did in 2000, Bush will win, 278-260. But if Kerry carries all the Gore states plus New Hampshire (4) and either Nevada or West Virginia (5 apiece), the result will be a 269-269 tie. We wrote a little program that came up with 3,689 scenarios for an Electoral College tie, assuming 17 "battleground states" are in play. If you're bored, try punching some of them into our Electoral College Calculator. (Scenarios marked with an asterisk will come up 270-268, since they presuppose that Maine, which chooses two of its four electors by congressional district, splits its vote 3-1.)
There are 262,144 possible outcomes in those 17 states (including both sweeps and 3-1 splits in Maine), so if we assume (counterfactually) that every outcome is equally probable, the chances of a tie are around 1.4%, or 1 in 71. Not too likely. But then, who'd have guessed that the popular-vote "winner" would lose the 2000 election, something that hadn't happened in the previous 30 elections? (Actually, as we recall, several people guessed just that, but they all thought the winner would be Gore.)
In the event of a tie, the House decides the election, under an unusual procedure in which each state's delegation gets a single vote. As this map shows, Republicans (red) currently hold the majority in 30 states' House delegations, to 17 for Democrats (blue, including independent self-decribed socialist Bernie Sanders of Vermont), with three states evenly split (yellow):
Because of a GOP gerrymander supplanting a Democratic one, Republicans are almost certain to hold a majority of the Texas delegation in the next Congress, the one that would resolve a deadlocked election (since electoral votes are officially counted on Jan. 6, after the new Congress takes office). This means that, assuming all House members vote for their party's candidate, the Democrats would have to take majorities in an additional six states to block a Bush victory on the first ballot, and in 10 states to ensure a Kerry victory. If Kerry can muster only 269 electoral votes, it seems unlikely he'll have the coattails to carry so many congressional candidates to victory. So a 269-269 tie probably means re-election for President Bush.
The vice president, meanwhile, would be chosen by the Senate, in a simple majority vote. That means if the Democrats retake the Senate, Bush could be saddled with John Edwards as his veep. And if the chamber is split 50-50, as it was after the 2000 election, Dick Cheney, as president of the Senate, could end up casting the deciding vote in his own favor.
The House hasn't decided a presidential election since 1824, when it elected John Quincy Adams after a four-man race in which no one had a majority of electoral votes. Twenty-four years earlier there had been an Electoral College tie, though the system worked differently in those days: Each elector cast two votes; the top finisher was elected president and the runner-up became vice president. Seventy-three electors voted for both Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr, and one was supposed to hold back his vote from Burr but did not. It took the House 36 ballots to elect Jefferson. (In 1804 Vice President Burr killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel.)
Congress and the states swiftly responded to the disputed 1800 election by ratifying the 12th Amendment, which set up the current system, in which electors vote separately for president and vice president, in time for the election of 1804. A tie is less likely today than it was in 1800, but there's an easy remedy that would eliminate the possibility: Congress could increase the size of the House by one member. (The number of electors equals the total number of House and Senate seats, plus three for the District of Columbia, so an even number of House seats would result in an odd number of electors.)
Given the 2000 census numbers and the reapportionment rules currently in effect, the new representative would go to heavily Republican Utah, so this would be an advantage for the GOP. But in terms of presidential politics that's a wash, since, as we've seen, the Republican presidential candidate is likely to win in the House in the event of a tie in the Electoral College. And after the 2010 census either party could benefit from the new seat.
Of course, this wouldn't eliminate the possibility of a three-way electoral split, which would still throw the election to the House if no one had a majority of electors. But our plan would prevent a normal two-party race from being thrown into the House.
Bush No More
On Friday, after publishing two sets of letters from readers who voted for Al Gore in 2000 and plan to vote for President Bush this year, we asked to hear from those who are going the other way--Bush 2000 voters who plan to cast their ballots for John Kerry. This brought a variety of responses, which we've published at the link atop this item. Here's how they break down:
Voted for Bush, plan to vote for Kerry: 2
Voted for Bush, leaning toward Kerry: 1
Voted for Bush, considering Kerry: 2
A friend or relative voted for Bush and plans to vote for Kerry: 3
Voted for Bush, plan to vote for a third candidate: 3
Voted for Bush, considering a third candidate: 4
So clearly there is a degree of disgruntlement with Bush. Among the reasons the correspondents cited for their change of heart: high government spending, the war in Iraq (both the decision to go to war and what some see as insufficient aggressiveness in waging it), the Federal Marriage Amendment (some fault Bush for favoring it, some for not pushing it strongly enough), civil-liberties concerns, Bush's "swagger," and Bush's support for Israel. Interestingly, both of the correspondents who say they definitely intend to vote for Kerry cited Israel among their reasons.
Unlike the erstwhile Gore supporters who wrote us last week, some of whom now strongly support Bush, it's hard to find any enthusiasm for Kerry in these letters (except the one from Henry Demond, who says his friend was wowed by Kerry's Vietnam record). This is consistent with polls that show people tend to back Bush because they like him and Kerry because they dislike Bush.
Seven of our letter-writers say only that they're considering voting for the Libertarian or another third-party candidate; some of them say they would never consider a vote for Kerry. There's almost certainly a selection bias at work here. This site tends to draw a conservative readership, so it's little wonder we'd hear from those who oppose Bush from the right (and in some cases for reasons we find sympathetic).
It'd be interesting if Josh Marshall or some other pro-Kerry blogger would solicit similar letters from his readers. Perhaps somewhere out there are people who voted for Bush in 2000 and actually like Kerry. We haven't heard from any of them.
A Message to the Press
Editor & Publisher, the newspaper trade magazine, reports on a new survey:
A national poll conducted for the Chicago Tribune on First Amendment issues has found that two in 10 say that newspaper editorials critical of a war the U.S. is fighting should not be allowed. Twenty percent also say that negative reporting on a war should not be allowed.
About half the public said there should have been some kind of press restraint on coverage of the prison abuse scandal in Iraq.
Count us among those who oppose government restraints on the press, except in the most extreme cases (reporting troop movements and the like). But if so many Americans agree that the press's over-the-top coverage of bad news in Iraq, and Abu Ghraib in particular, is a problem, editors and publishers would be wise to take heed. After all, there's nothing in the First Amendment that prevents the press from exercising self-restraint.
Great Moments in Journalism
The Albany (N.Y.) Times Union, which last month editorialized that imprisoning terrorists is "every bit as dangerous" as the Sept. 11 attacks, has a news story about the 20th anniversary of "the most racially divisive killing in the city's history," in which police shot a 35-year-old mentally ill man. (The case was ruled a justifiable homicide.) The ATU goes to the neighborhood where the the shooting happened and gets some incisive man-on-the-street comments:
"Never heard of him," John Page, 57, said Thursday morning, as he sat and smoked a cigarette on the crumbled front stoop at 60 Clinton Ave. He had paused on a walk from his Arbor Hill home a few blocks away. Page moved from Long Island in 1996 to avoid the fallout from a bitter divorce and knew nothing of the Davis case.
Neither had Jaron Daniels, who was visiting a friend next door at 62 Clinton Ave. and was told of the Davis case.
"That's some mad (expletive) I didn't know about," said Daniels, 25, a rapper with the stage name Gunzalez, who came to Albany in 1993. "Those cops up here are killers. Word."
Why are the comments of people who don't know anything about the matter at hand news? And if all Daniels knows about the case is what Grondahl told him in the course of the interview, how does he come to the conclusion that "those cops up here are killers"?
Sounds as if those reporters up there are biased. Word.
What Would Gamblers Do Without Experts?
"Experts: Lottery Can Be Trouble for Gamblers"--headline, (Nashville) Tennessean, July 7
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Cycle of Violence
"Lawmakers Attack Violent Video Games"--headline, Associated Press, July 6
We Get Results (and That's Not Necessarily Good)
No sooner had we published yesterday's item on the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee's "Bush birthday haiku" contest, in which we observed that "we'd hate to read the 10 least imaginative and hilarious" entries, than the DCCC put up a page promising just that:
We know that not everyone is destined to be an American Haiku Idol--besides, really bad performances can be even more entertaining than the good ones.
In appreciation of those among us who were shortchanged in the poetic ability department, we'll be compiling a list of the ten absolute worst entries. . . . Come back soon to see the worst of the worst.
If not for us, these guys would have no ideas at all.
London's New Tourist Attraction: Dead Iranians
"British officials were taken aback yesterday by a plan to unearth the remains of Iranian soldiers and rebury them in the grounds of Iran's London embassy," London's Daily Telegraph reports:
Iran's Sacred Defence Preservation Foundation, which preserves the memory of soldiers who died in the 1980-88 war with Iraq, wants to send an unspecified number of "unknown martyrs" to London to create a weekend attraction for Iranian expatriates.
"Iranians across Europe told us that they wanted to commemorate those who defended Iran, and they wanted a place to go on Sundays," explained Daoud Ghiasirad, the head of public relations for the foundation.
Tehran is already the world's leading export of terrorism. Now it wants to start exporting tourism too. |
