JAN. 22, 2004: THE POST-IOWA DEMOCRATS: PHONEY TOUGH
The more I reflect on them, the more I believe that the Iowa results were a profoundly good thing for the country and, oddly enough, even for President Bush.
True, the president will now almost certainly face a more electable challenger than he would if Howard Dean were to win the Democratic nomination – or Wesley Clark for that matter. John Kerry, John Edwards, and Joe Lieberman are not doomed sure losers in the way that Dean and Clark are. Against Dean or Clark, President Bush would hardly have to campaign at all: He would only have to rebroadcast their own videotaped words over and over again – their own already committed errors would doom their candidacies.
Kerry, Edwards, and Lieberman, by contrast, have not made unforced errors on the necessary scale. If either of them prevails, President Bush will have to win his second term by hard work and serious persuasion. That’s less fun than the shooting-fish-in-a-barrel campaign against Dean or Clark. But it will prepare the way for a much more successful Bush second term.
How you campaign shapes how you govern. By pressing President Bush to explain and defend his activist approach to the terror war, a Kerry, Edwards, or Lieberman candidacy will force the Bush camp to talk candidly about why his approach will work – and why the Democratic approach will not. They will force President Bush to mobilize public support for his bold vision – and drive him away from the mushy middle. If faced by more effective opponents, the Bush political operation will quickly perceive the weakness of the vague, feel-good campaign that has been tempting some Bush staffers. You’re not going to beat John Kerry or John Edwards or Joe Lieberman by condemning the use of steroids in professional sports. To beat them, President Bush will need big issues, big themes – and a big vision.
Enunciating those issues and that theme will be good for him – and good for the country.
Bush will win in the end. As Richard Perle and I argued in yesterday’s New York Times, the leading Democrats aren’t really tough on terror, only phoney tough. By helping the nation to understand why the Democratic approach to terror is phoney, President Bush will advance the country’s understanding of the real work that needs now to be done.
01:09 AM
JAN. 21, 2004: SOTU
Headlines
The splashiest item in last night’s speech was the president’s endorsement of the Federal Marriage Amendment – a huge win for social conservatives.
The best bit of speechmaking was the perfect timing of the president’s list of the countries that had joined the US coalition in Iraq.
The cleverest political snare was his detailing of the taxes that would rise if Congress failed to make his tax cuts permanent.
But the words that will echo loudest around the world were the words of the presidents’ stern warning to the government of Iran. All he said was that the United States remains “committed” to keeping the world’s most dangerous weapons out of the hands of the world’s most dangerous regimes. But post-Iraq, those words take on extra resonance. They mean something – and that is Bush’s (and the U.S. military’s) gift to the American nation.
At Home
The speech offered little comfort to anyone worried about the rate of growth in government spending. Who would disagree that resources ought to be used, as the president said, “wisely”? The trouble is, some people think it is wise to spend a lot – and they seem to have the majority of votes in the US Congress these days. What will the president do about it? Evidently, not much: His one veto threat was a response to anyone who might be contemplating that Congress spend less ….
Meanwhile, Social Security reform, Medicare reform, and tort reform all get pats on the heads – and a general endorsement cashable maybe in the second term, maybe never.
Abroad
There was an interesting Freudian slip in the president’s speech. At one point, he had this to say about the Middle East: “America is pursuing a forward strategy of freedom in the greater Middle East. We will challenge the enemies of reform, confront the allies of terror, and expect a higher standard from our friends.” Except he didn’t say “friends.” He stumbled and said, “friend.” Hmmm. Wonder which “friend” he had in mind? Might it be that nice desert kingdom that is always telling us in English about how well-intentioned it is – even as it practices oppression at home and funds extremism overseas?
Second Thought
One quick fix on my own part. Yesterday, in listing the qualities that would make George Bush a better president than either Senators Kerry or Edwards, I referred to “courage.” I certainly did not mean to imply that either senator lacked physical courage – indeed, Senator Kerry (as his admirers often point out) was decorated for bravery in Vietnam. I was talking about political courage – the quality that makes leaders defy conventional wisdom and electoral defeat.. But probably it would have been clearer and better if I’d said that Kerry and Edwards lack, not “courage,” but “boldness.”
12:22 AM
JAN. 20, 2004: VOTING DAY
The Loonies Lose
Have the Democrats gone sane? Yesterday Iowa Democrats administered a brutal drubbing to Howard Dean and the far left of the Democratic party generally, opting instead for the two most sensible candidates on the ballot. If the Democrats go on to drub General Wesley Clark in New Hampshire, we may have to revisit all those articles about the “angry electorate” and “divided America” – and open our minds to the hopeful reality that the patriotic consensus of 9/11 still holds.
Neither John Kerry nor John Edwards would make as good a president as George Bush. They lack his courage, his toughness, and his principles. That said, the Iowa results are deeply reassuring: There are some 600,000 Democrats in Iowa, and they may be some of the most liberal Democrats in the country. And yet when the time came to cast a ballot, not even they could stomach the destructive opportunism of the Dean campaign.
From a purely selfish partisan point of view, I’m sorry that Dean did not do better: He was and remains the most beatable of all the major candidates. But partisanship isn’t everything. The Democratic voters of Iowa spotted the worst candidate and the worst man in the race, and soundly thrashed him.
Punditoids
One thing I’ve never understood about election night: the punditocracy’s fascination with odd facts. “Do you know, Judy, that no left-handed non-incumbent in a year ending with a zero has ever won in Iowa and then gone on to win the nomination?” “In years when the caucus fell on an even-numbered date, the candidate with the longest last name has always won.” “Do you realize that Iowa was the first state to ban pinball machines?” Hordes of young researchers churn up these random pieces of information and shoot them into the news anchors’ ears. Almost all of them are either pure coincidences or else entirely meaningless.
Meanwhile, think of all the things that go unsaid in the hundreds of hours of cable television coverage. Wouldn’t it be a service if one of the cable networks would broadcast unedited all the television commercials the candidates are putting on the air? Or interview all 99 of the county party chairmen? Or take a video camera aboard a campaign bus and let it run? The cable nets have hours and hours of time. It’s a magnificent resource – they should use it.
WMD - The Other Side
Meanwhile, I wonder if you saw this: a truly creepy disturbing story (from the Guardian of all places!) about how surprisingly sophisticated and advanced the Libyan nuclear program may have been.
"'What was found in Libya marks a new stage in proliferation,' said one knowledgeable source. 'Libya was buying what was available. And what is available, the centrifuges, are close to turnkey facilities. That's a new challenge. Libya was buying something that's ready to wear.'"
Iraq war opponent seem to wish to lull people into a state of complacency about the problem of WMD-seeking Middle Eastern dictators. But these weapons are available and are spreading - and decisive action has to be taken against them, not only in Iraq, but everywhere.
Finally ...
As people tote up the winners and losers of last night's voting, one name is being overlooked: Bill Clinton. He is a big loser, or so it seems to me. Early on, Clinton had given a wink and a nod to John Edwards. Like Clinton, Edwards was a southerner, positioned as a moderate, electable, etc. Then Clinton seems to have turned against Edwards - and instead prodded Wesley Clark into the race.
Clark is in more than one way a continuation of the Clinton legacy: first, he has surrounded himself with former Clinton staffers (Jamie Rubin being perhaps the best known). Second, he turns out to be a much odder and more complicated person than he initially appeared - just like the maestro himself, come to think of it.
But after the vote in Iowa, Clark's position suddenly seems a lot weaker. By drubbing Dean, the Iowa Dems diminish the need for an anti-Dean. And given that Edwards has proven himself an effective campaigner, the idea that the Dems need to turn to a politically inexperienced general in order to go toe-to-toe with George Bush suddenly seems less credible.
Clinton in other words may have bet on the wrong horse - and in the process, done real damage to his relationship with the right one.
12:02 AM
JAN. 18, 2004: STATES OF THE UNION
Iowa
If the latest polls are to be believed, Howard Dean may not after all win decisively in Iowa. If so, this is heartening news: It suggests that – contrary to earlier appearances – insane-Americans are not after all emerging as the decisive bloc in the Democrats’ rainbow coalition …
Who's Decadent?
Last week’s speculation about the motives of Hamas’ first female suicide-bomber turned out not to be so speculative after all. According to the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot, Reem Al-Reyashi was forced to detonate herself by her family after her husband discovered her in an extramarital affair. In an especially gruesome detail, the job of handing al-Reyashi the dynamite belt was assigned to her former lover.
Can we please, please, please now retire the often-heard line that Western societies have something to learn from the simple, heartfelt faith of the Islamic extremists? I’m not sure whether Hamas reminds me more of the blood cult of the ancient Aztecs or the cruelest subsections of the American Mafia, but I am sure that the United States with all its fads, follies, and vices is in every way a more moral and godly society than the one that Hamas seeks to realize. And if the choice really is between a society that produces a Reem al-Reyashi or one that produces Britney Spears … then hand me the channel changer: I want my MTV!
The Big Speech
President Bush is now doing the final rounds of practice for his State of the Union address. Here’s a prediction: In every major speech since 9/11, has enlarged and extended the argument he first advanced to the joint session of Congress on September 20, 2001: that the war on terror is a big war, involving not only terror groups but terror governments and the terror ideology – and that the United States can and must see the war through to ultimate victories. There have been many opportunities for him to back down from that grand and risky position, and he has rejected every one. The president’s opponents and detractors are hoping for a backdown in his Tuesday night speech – for signs of a scuttle from Iraq, or at least for a downgrading of the importance of the war. My guess: They hope in vain. I don’t expect that the president will talk explicitly about what is coming next. This president tends not to talk until action is imminent. But I am confident that he will reaffirm his commitment to see this war through to the end: that he will not back down one inch from his view that terror is the great evil of our time – and that, to coin a phrase, it is an evil that can be ended.
Mea Culpa
I seem to have scrambled the link to Prospect magazine's article on French corruption. It seems that the site does not want to let you link directly to the piece - here is the link to Prospect's home page, with the article on France at top.
11:15 PM
JAN. 16, 2004: COMMUNICATION GAP
How corrupt is France? It is often said that one reason that Jacques Chirac ran for re-election as president in 2002 was to preserve his immunity from prosecution. But the full awfulness of the situation – the way in which bribery and the theft of public funds pervades French life – is not well understood in the United States. For a vivid introduction to the problem, see the extremely interesting cover story in the current issue of Britain’s Prospect magazine.
The story details the doomed attempted of one magistrate to get to the bottom of a series of scandals involving hundreds of millions of dollars looted from public companies and diverted to political parties and private individuals - Francois Mitterand's national system of kickbacks on local construction projects - and formal and informal state controls on the media to suppress coverage of the scandal.
It ought to be more widely understood in the United States how much European corruption -- and French corruption in particular -- damages the trans-Atlantic relationship. Kickbacks and bribes play an especially large role in Europe's trade with the Middle East. Much of the European loathing for those Americans who want to change the Middle East is pretty directly traceable to the fear that change in the region will threaten the livelihood of powerful Europeans and the funding of European political parties.
European corruption influences European press coverage of the United States as well. European journalists obsess over "neocons" in American politics precisely because they know that in their societies, the important political decisions are made by concealed, sinister, self-interested forces - and they find it hard to imagine that American politics could be different. Meanwhile, American journalists cover Europe like some wire service circa 1952: with a charmingly naive faith that everything actually is just the way it seems on the surface, and that the spoken words of European politicians actually give some insight into their real motives. Because US politics are so transparent and responsive, the American media is genuinely flummoxed by societies in which shadowy conspiracies really do exist.
08:18 AM
JAN. 15, 2004: FEMINISM, HAMAS-STYLE
A Breakthrough for Palestinian Women
The Palestinian radical Islamic group Hamas has just deployed its first female suicide bomber, Reem al-Raiyshi, a 22-year-old mother of two. Kind of puts the American debate about women in combat in a new perspective doesn’t it? Who says fundamentalist Islam is hostile to the aspirations of women?
But this breakthrough for Islamic feminism has some interesting aspects that aren’t being reported, not yet anyway. One question that immediately comes to mind: What happened to the suicide-bomber’s husband? According to early news reports, Raiyshi was married. Yet while she swears in her suicide video that she loved her soon-to-be orphaned three-year-old and 18-month-year-old, she had nothing to say about their father.
Is he alive? While the 800 or so Israeli casualties since September 2000 have mostly been women and children, the overwhelming majority of the 2000-plus Palestinian casualties have been men of military age. Yet one has to think that if Reem al-Raiyshi’s husband numbered among the casualties of Arafat’s terror war, his devoted widow would have mentioned him.
Is he a prisoner? Again, one would think that al-Raiyshi might have had a word or two to say.
So how to explain why he went unmentioned? Might he have divorced and abandoned her under Islamic law – and, still following that law, taken custody of her children? If so, could her abandonment and shame and the loss of her children party explain her willingness to kill and die? Could the twisted imaginations of the local Hamas chiefs have pointed suicide-murder out to her as a solution to her problems – a way to erase the shame of being discarded, a way to redeem herself in the eyes of her family, a way to acquire glory in the eyes of her children, and even a way to earn them some money: for Saudi money still continues to flow to the families of suicide bombers.
It’s a very striking thing how the Palestinian groups have profited from their own oppression of their local women. First they deprive them of all hope in life – then they exploit that hopelessness to make killers of them. Yasser Arafat’s Al Aqsa brigades have been using women bombers for many months now – and again and again one reads of them words to the effect of: “Her family was baffled by her action. They had just arranged a marriage for her, and they thought that she was looking forward to her new life ….”
These observations undergird a point that Richard Perle and I stress in An End to Evil: that the war on terror is not just a battle on the ground – it is a battle of ideas: extremist Islam against democracy and freedom, including freedom for women. The self-described realists who promise that Middle Eastern autocracies can guarantee US security and the flow of oil if only we refrain from “destabilizing” them are deluding themselves. The cruel “stability” of Middle Eastern life is precisely what is creating the terrorists. The region needs – and Americans need – an emancipating wave of destabilization that shatters for good and all the prestige and credibility of the murderous imams of Hamas and its supporters in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the region.
09:53 AM |
