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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (3929)	7/29/2003 5:14:02 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 794369

I could not have a more classic example of "Slant" than the article you just read from the Times. Now read the same story from the Post. I had to dig in the Times article to come up with the shift on white males. The Post leads with it. Poll Finds Democrats Lack Crucial Support to Beat Bush Party Must Strongly Reposition Itself to Regain White Male Voters' Support, DLC Advised By Dan Balz Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, July 29, 2003; Page A03 PHILADELPHIA, July 28 -- Dramatic erosion in support among white men has left the Democrats in a highly vulnerable position and unless the party strongly repositions itself, President Bush will be virtually impossible to beat in 2004, according to a new poll commissioned for the centrist Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). The gloomy prognosis came despite evidence in the poll and in the assessments of Democratic elected officials attending the DLC's "national conversation" here that the economy alone makes Bush vulnerable for reelection. But Mark J. Penn, who conducted the poll, said that the party's image has regressed since former president Bill Clinton left office and that those weaknesses put Democrats in a weakened position. Penn said his polling indicates that since Clinton left office in 2001, more Americans believe Democrats are the party of big government and higher taxes and he said Bush's handling of the war on terrorism has opened up a huge gap with Democrats on who is more trusted on issues of national security. "If Democrats can't close the security gap, then they can't be competitive in the next election," said Penn, who polled for Clinton in his second term and who is the pollster for the presidential campaign of Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (Conn.). The poll showed Bush's vulnerabilities. Fewer than half of those surveyed (48 percent) think he deserves to be reelected and 53 percent said the economy is heading in the wrong direction. But Penn said Democrats must make a concerted effort to appeal to white voters, particularly men and married women, to make the 2004 race competitive. He said just 22 percent of white men identified with the Democratic Party in his poll, and he said younger men are even more strongly Republican in their leanings. Penn's poll was used by DLC leaders to press their argument that Democrats must embrace the kind of centrist policies espoused by Clinton to avoid a humiliating defeat in 2004, and they used the two-day conference to continue a debate over the direction of the party that has intensified in recent months. DLC leaders have criticized former Vermont governor Howard Dean, whose antiwar rhetoric fueled his rise to prominence in the Democratic presidential race, and today, Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.), the DLC chairman, warned that the party is "at risk of being taken over by the far left." The choice for Democrats, Bayh said, is, "Do we want to vent or do we want to govern?" But not all of those in attendance agreed with the Dean bashing. Washington state Rep. Laura Ruderman decried the battles between party centrists and liberals, and told the audience, "I don't think we can be successful if we go down that rat hole." Pennsylvania Gov. Edward G. Rendell went out of his way to praise Dean's record as governor and said he had "great respect" for Dean. Rendell also challenged the findings of Penn, who claimed Democrats were at a 50-year low ebb. Citing the election of Democratic governors in 2002 in states such as Michigan, Illinois, Kansas, Arkansas and Pennsylvania, Rendell said, "I think the talent bank is beginning to be replenished." Rendell appeared with six other Democratic governors: Arizona's Janet Napolitano, Kansas's Kathleen Sebelius, Michigan's Jennifer Granholm, New Jersey's James McGreevey, New Mexico's Bill Richardson and Virginia's Mark Warner. They said that Bush has broken his promises to fund homeland security and his education accountability bill in their states but expressed frustration that Democrats have been unsuccessful in making a case against the president on these issues or the economy. washingtonpost.com

To: JohnM who wrote (3929)	7/29/2003 5:22:10 AM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 794369

I bet the Repubs get one of the 11 Dems to come back. That is all they need. Tex. Senate Democrats Flee Session Associated Press Tuesday, July 29, 2003; Page A02 AUSTIN, July 28 -- Democratic state lawmakers fled Texas today for the second time in three months to thwart a Republican drive to redraw the state's congressional districts. Eleven of the 12 Democrats in the state Senate left for Albuquerque as a first special session called by the governor to address redistricting drew to a close and he called a second special session. "We're availing ourselves of a tool given to us by our Texas Constitution to break a quorum," Sen. Gonzalo Barrientos said at a hotel in Albuquerque. "It's not about Democrats, it's about democracy." Asked how long the group might stay in New Mexico, Sen. Judith Zaffirini of Laredo said: "Thirty days. More if it's necessary." In May, during the regular spring session, the Republicans tried to push redistricting toward a vote in the GOP-controlled state House. But 51 Democrats in that chamber fled across the state line to Oklahoma to block a quorum, killing the bill. On Monday, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst began the new session by ordering the 11 who left back to the chamber. "I'm asking our Senate Democrats to come back and to work with us," Dewhurst said. "I would say that I'm very, very disappointed." It takes two-thirds of the Senate's 31 members -- 21 -- to form a quorum.

To: JohnM who wrote (3929)	7/29/2003 6:12:08 AM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 794369

There they go again! I thought the Front page lead story in the NYT today was a piece of crap. Mickey Kaus confirms it. The NY Post could not get away with this kind of reporting. Gloomy Louie Gets It Wrong It's "presumably" the NYT's latest embarrassment. By Mickey Kaus How to 'Presume' Your Way onto the NYT Front Page: The New York Times's Gloomy Louie Uchitelle will paint the economy in any color as long as it's black. A few points about today's dose of determined depression, "Red Ink in States is Beginning to Hurt Economic Recovery." 1) As my colleague Eric Umansky's "Today's Papers" notes, The second graf of Uchitelle's story contains this astonishing sentence: In California alone, a tentative budget deal will presumably require the state to rid itself of at least $8 billion in current spending, with the cuts likely to fall most heavily on education and aid to the poor. [Emph. added] Since when do NYT reporters writing the day's front-page lead story get away with saying "presumably" instead of finding out what's "actually"? Using speculative fudge-words like "presumably" is what we bloggers do! Heck, I can be a NYT reporter if that's all it takes. As Umansky notes, Uchitelle's "presumably" speculation is almost certainly wrong. The budget deal actually closes the multi-billion dollar gap mainly with borrowing, not spending cuts--and there's little reason to think next year's deficit will be handled differently. 2) The chart accompanying Uchitelle's story shows the states running surpluses during the boom and big deficits during the current slowdown. But wait a minute ...deficits stimulate the economy. So the Times's chart actually shows the states countercyclically doing what they are supposed to be doing --the opposite of the story Uchitelle's trying to tell. What "hurts the economic recovery" is when prospective deficits lead to spending cuts. Undoubtedly states are cutting back spending--though there's very little quantification of this in Uchitelle's piece, except for his admission that state spending is actually still growing by "barely 1 percent annually" (though it's growing less rapidly than before). To the extent states do cut spending, of course, those ominous-looking deficit bars on the Times' ominous-looking graph would be smaller, not bigger. 3) Unable to document the size of the spending cuts, Uchitelle shifts mid-piece to arguing that needed services are being trimmed--i.e. "Medicaid outlays are still rising in California but no longer enough to cover inflation"--which is an interesting point but not the point about harming the recovery that Uchitelle started off trying to make. But hey, it's bad news, so throw it in! 4) Other dire developments decried by Uchitelle include include a) "parallel" tax cuts in states that link their tax collections to now-lower federal taxes; b) delayed payments to pension savings plans, and c) optimistic forecasts that allow spending to continue. These are all bad things--but, again, they're all stimulative moves, contradicting Uchitelle's alleged thesis. 5) What will Uchitelle do when the economy recovers? He'll write a long, Timesian apology admitting and correcting his errors! Presumably. Note to Bill Keller: If you can't do something about this guy, why take the job? Update: The Sacramento Bee's Daniel Weintraub, who knows more about the California budget than I do, reams Uchitelle's embarrassingly lazy reporting . It turns out that "more than half of the reported spending reduction is actually a tax increase -- the $4 billion tripling of the car tax." This tax increase gets recorded as a spending cut for arcane California-specific reasons that Weintraub explains. ... The tax increase is a Keynesian drag on the economy, but it's still not what Uchitelle says it was. (If he had decried state tax increases as 'hurting the economy,' he might have sounded a bit ... well, Republican.) Other California "spending cuts" turn out to be simple bookkeeping gimmicks. Contrary to Uchitellle's story of $12 billion in already-made cuts--and $8 billion more in mythical "presumably" cuts--Weintraub thinks that when you add up all the gimmicks "it's possible that actual government outlays in California will rise, not fall, in the year ahead." 9 /id/2086151/