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Iraq and Roll
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, September 8, 2003; 8:54 AM
Are the Democrats being -- dare I say it -- intellectually inconsistent?
Did four major Democratic candidates vote for the war in Iraq, only to proclaim that they had grave doubts now that things have gone sour there?
Are they trying to emulate the success of Howard Dean's antiwar stance by belatedly bashing President Bush over how we got to this point?
It's possible, I suppose, for a candidate to argue that he supported the war because he wanted Saddam Hussein toppled but doesn't like the way the president blew off many of our allies with his unilateralist approach. Or thinks the president didn't send enough troops. (Bush did, however, get that first U.N. resolution and presided over a successful war.)
It's equally possible to argue that the administration has totally bungled the postwar period, had no plan to rebuild the shattered country or protect U.S. forces, and wasn't honest about the cost. (You know things have fallen apart when the president feels compelled to make a prime-time address, sans flight suit, as he did last night. "GOP House and Senate leaders made it clear to Bush that he needs to be more forthright about what the U.S. commitment in Iraq entails," says the Chicago Tribune.)
But the fact is, the United States went to war in Iraq with the approval of Congress, including John Kerry, John Edwards, Dick Gephardt and Joe Lieberman. For them to now loudly insist that they "warned" Bush about this or that doesn't quite match their vote, at a time when voting against the war was seen as soft-on-defense political suicide. And why does Kerry keep talking about a "rush to war"? The war may or may not have been a good idea, but it was the most telegraphed military conflict in modern history, with months of warnings to Saddam, negotiations with the United Nations and other slow-motion diplomacy.
Could the current Democratic rhetoric on Iraq amount to nothing more than political repositioning? Salon's Joan Walsh seems to think so:
"I never agree with Charles Krauthammer, but I really had to grapple with his Friday column, assessing Sen. John Kerry's failure to catch fire with Democratic voters this year. The dark, dyspeptic Krauthammer is of course rooting for Kerry and all Democrats to fail, so you have to read the column that way. But he put his finger on Kerry's toughest task: Trying to act like he always opposed the Iraq war, even though he gave Bush a blank check to wage it. In his campaign kickoff Tuesday, Krauthammer noted, Kerry 'claimed that he had voted just to "threaten" war with Iraq, which is an odd way to characterize voting in favor of a resolution that explicitly authorizes the president to go to war if and when he pleases.'
"Thursday night's debate raised the same tough issue for all the Democratic presidential candidates. It may well be looked back upon as a turning point for the party, when even its most pro-war contenders savaged the president's increasingly disastrous war against Iraq. But even for a Democrat, the scene was a little unsettling. Relative hawks Rep. Dick Gephardt and Sen. Joe Lieberman were attacking Bush's war, even though last year, they tried to set themselves apart from more dovish Dems by enthusiastically defending it. And Kerry and Sen. John Edwards, whose support was more nuanced but whose congressional votes for Bush's blank check last October counted just the same, joined them in the Bush-bashing.
"I thought the pile-on was unseemly -- and again, yes, I'm a Democrat. Come January, if Bush has repaired Iraq, frontrunner and war-critic Howard Dean might have to head home. But if Iraq is as sad and bloody as it seems today, everyone who voted for this war might have to pack their bags and turn their war chests over to the war opponents, for the good of the party, and the world, and their souls.
"Let's be honest: When war supporter Gephardt attacked Bush's Iraq performance Thursday night -- 'It's incomprehensible that we would wind up in this situation without a plan and without international cooperation to get this done' -- it was a little bewildering. Frankly, I found it equally incomprehensible how someone could support the war as Gephardt did, and now pretend that he didn't know the president had no plan and no international cooperation to get it done. I knew that, sitting behind my desk in San Francisco, raising my teenaged daughter. Why didn't anyone tell Gephardt, the savvy House minority leader?"
Now that Bush has asked for another $87 billion in Iraq spending in his televised speech, the nay Sayers are likely to engage in some serious finger-wagging. Here's the New York Times analysis : "President Bush's task tonight was to convince the country that the terrible toll of the long, hot, casualty ridden summer in Iraq was a necessary price to pay in a broader struggle against terrorism, and to prepare the electorate for years of occupation, billions more in expense, and many bad days.
"His sobering speech to the nation was not the one that the White House was envisioning for the president four months after he declared the end of the "active combat" phase of the war. Even in July, as Mr. Bush prepared for a month at his ranch, his aides were talking optimistically about a fall devoted to transforming Iraq quickly into a model democracy at the heart of the Middle East, and making its transition to a peacefulnation contagious throughout the region.
"Now there is reason to wonder whether that vision was unrealistically optimistic - at least on the time scale Mr. Bush and his aides once described - or whether it was, as one of his former foreign policy advisers put it recently, 'optimism blended with a touch of naïveté.'
"Every week events from Baghdad to Jerusalem seem to be spinning out of the control of a Bush team that, during the president's trip to the region in late May, seemed intent on demonstrating that it now had the power to transform the region."
Coincidence or not, the latest Zogby poll has Bush down to a 45 percent approval rating, the lowest of his presidency.
The latest '04 news is John Edwards saying he won't run for his Senate seat next year -- a clear attempt to quell rumors that he might soon drop out and seek reelection. Quite a riverboat gamble.
The Note says Dean emerged unscathed from Albuquerque:
"Dean was attacked in the debate and by insta-release as both too pro-free trade and too protectionist. "In the spin room, Dean appeared and seemed gratified and a bit relieved not to have been attacked too often. We also think:
"--Gephardt is the only one who could argue that he helped himself - with his rousing 'miserable failure' line. "--Lieberman is emerging as the race's aggressor at the same time as many Democrats continue to think he's unelectable because he's too grandfatherishly nice. (When was the last your grandfather accused you of portending economic ruin?)
"--John Kerry had his (literal) voice. But by our eyes, Senator Kerry did not grace the spin room, although his rivals all did.
"--That peppering your sentences with the occasional Spanish phrase strikes us somewhere between cloying and patronizing - and funny, when the accents are obviously off."
Bueno!
By the way, the latest Boston Globe poll has Dean leading Kerry in New Hampshire, 36 to 24 percent, and capturing 54 percent of McCain's '00 voters. Gephardt and Lieberman are at 7, and Edwards at 6. Interesting sidelight: if please-draft-me candidate Wesley Clark jumps in, "the number of undecided voters jumped from 9 percent to 23 percent (and 5 percent said they would probably vote for Clark)."
The New Republic's Jonathan Cohn chides Dean on trade:
"Joe Lieberman pounced on a recent statement in The Washington Post where Howard Dean seemed to say that he would not maintain free trade with countries that don't uphold U.S. environmental and labor standards--regardless of their level of development. For example, he'd no longer have free trade with Mexico (presumably, he'd threaten to pull out of NAFTA) unless Mexico agreed to enforce a minimum wage equal to the U.S. minimum wage--a fairly absurd demand given the relative level of wealth and development there.?
"Dean's response? He said wasn't prepared to enforce U.S. labor standards per se; instead, he wanted to enforce standards set by the International Labor Organization. That, of course, is a more reasonable standard--as Lieberman himself had to acknowledge. But it's not at all the way it was reported in Fred Hiatt's Washington Post column. After the debate, the Dean campaign indicated that Hiatt's piece had paraphrased Dean--impying that he had meant international standards, as opposed to U.S. standards, all along. That'd be a lot more plausible, though, if Hiatt's recollection of the conversation weren't so specifically recounted in his column--and if Slate's Chris Sullentrop hadn't heard Dean said something along the very same lines.
"More likely, Dean hadn't entirely thought through his trade position in those early conversations, realized that enforcing U.S. labor standards was something not even Richard Gephardt (who among the major candidates has been the most consistent critic of free trade) would do, and amended his position."
National Review's Rich Lowry isn't getting choked up over Kerry:
"John Kerry's most consequential public act recently might be that he openly wept. This should make him the undisputed heir to Bill Clinton, and establish that Kerry, despite his reputation for aloofness, 'gets it'--'it' being the modern American imperative to mist up at the slightest instigation.
"Barbara Woodman of Concord, N.H., told Kerry the other day that she had been laid off from her job, but was going to work to educate her children. 'I don't care how many jobs I have to work, those kids are going to college,' she said. It's a hard-luck story, but not exactly a tearjerker. Kerry nonetheless wiped away a tear.
"Public tears famously undid Edmund Muskie when he cried in the New Hampshire primary in 1972 about an attack on his wife. Thirty years and an ocean of public tears later, weepiness is now a kind of virtue. In contemporary America, the stiff upper lip has become the most unnecessary anatomical feature this side of the appendix.
"But hold your Kleenex, please. This is a rotten development. It means we no longer value traditional manliness in quite the same way, have begun to consider sentiment more important than reason in our public life, and value moral laxity and excuse-making more than responsibility."
Oh, and by the way: "Bill Clinton led the way."
Sniff!
A fascinating debate has erupted between two former New Republic editors over whether the Terminator's 1977 account of he and his fellow bodybuilders getting it on with a lone woman is important or not in the California recall. First, Slate's Michael Kinsley:
"True, you can't nail Arnold on hypocrisy. He told this story on himself 26 years ago and hasn't troubled to deny it since it re-emerged. In fact, if there is any dishonesty here, it may be in the anecdote itself. Did this parody of a testosterone fantasy really happen?...
"But if it did happen, exactly as Arnold described it in 1977, it's pretty disgusting. It's disgusting even if it was consensual all around. It's disgusting even though Arnold wasn't married at the time. It's disgusting even if this amounts to applying the standards of the 21st century to events of the mid-1970s. Schwarzenegger isn't running for governor of California in 1975.
"In terms of his fitness for elected office, the fact that Schwarzenegger bragged about this episode in a published interview makes the question of whether it really happened almost irrelevant. In 1977, at least, he wished to have people believe that he shared and was proud of an attitude toward women that is not acceptable in a politician. And in 2003, all he has said is that he doesn't remember the interview. He hasn't said whether he remembers the episode itself-or, if he doesn't, whether that is because it never happened or because it happened too often to keep track. More important, he hasn't said what he thinks about it all from the perspective of 2003.
"Arnold may be just surfing the zeitgeist: a swinger in the swinging '70s ..Like similar statements from George W. Bush about his drinking and Dan Quayle about evading the draft, Schwarzenegger has said he didn't know back then that he'd be running for governor today. Which works fine as an explanation, but fails miserably as exoneration."
All this is a bit much for Andrew Sullivan:
"Mike Kinsley has long been brilliant at jabbing people on high horses. Now he's climbed on top of one. Kinsley has long advocated the removal of any public figure's privacy and so is delighted to see Arnold's lively sexual past come back to haunt him. But he's particularly outraged by AS's recounting in an old interview in Oui magazine ...
"But why is group sex between consenting adults in private 'disgusting'? I guess disgust is not something you can justify or explain. It's a feeling, not an argument. As for arguments, I can understand why someone who takes a culturally conservative view of sex might feel this way, but a good libertarian-liberal like Mike? Kinsley's attempt at a justification is that the incident, even if made up, reflects 'an attitude toward women that is not acceptable in a politician.'
"Hmmm. Is this the same Mike Kinsley who defended Bill Clinton? By any standards, AS's sins are, in fact, far less significant than BC's." Schwarzenegger's supposed orgy "wasn't sexual harrassment, so far as we know, which gives Arnold a moral advantage over the ex-prez. It wasn't adultery, ahem. It wasn't hypocrisy, as Kinsley concedes, which gives AS another advantage over Clinton...
"Does Kinsley believe that all women are so sexually vulnerable that they cannot consent to such group sex and enjoy it? Why does this harrumphing sound a little like partisanship to me?"
Over to you, Mike.
The other California initiative is in deep trouble, says the Los Angeles Times:
"Ward Connerly all but conceded defeat Saturday on Proposition 54, his ballot measure to restrict the government collection of racial and ethnic data, after Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante said he would spend nearly $4 million to defeat it and Arnold Schwarzenegger also indicated his opposition.
"Bustamante's move is the result of a strategic shift in his campaign for governor. Hoping to defuse an issue that has dogged him on the campaign trail, his chief strategist said, the lieutenant governor is abandoning plans to advertise his candidacy using the nearly $4 million from labor unions and casino-owning Indian tribes.
"Instead, he will spend the campaign cash on television commercials featuring himself denouncing Proposition 54, which will share the Oct. 7 ballot with the recall.
"'Gulp,' Connerly said when informed of the decision. A nearly $4-million campaign against his measure, he said, 'probably dooms' it."
Some recall candidates with no hope of winning are getting more attention than other recall candidates with no hope of winning. As this Weekly Standard piece by Bill Whalen makes clear:
"Recall makes for strange bedfellows. Arnold Schwarzenegger has coupled onscreen with Sharon Stone. Arianna Huffington and Al Franken hit the sheets, John-and-Yoko-style, to report on the 1996 national conventions. Cruz Bustamante is in bed with the Indian gaming tribes that underwrite his campaign.
"And then there's Mary Carey: adult entertainment performer and independent candidate for governor. Maybe you know her from such classics as 'Double D Dolls 2,' 'Girls School 4,' 'Hot Showers 6,' 'New Wave Hookers 8,' and 'Decadent Divas 17' (and 18!).
"Carey--real name Mary Cook (she borrowed her stage name from Mariah Carey)--isn't shy about who she is. 'Even though I'm a bubbly, blonde porn star, I'm not stupid,' she told 'Entertainment Tonight.' 'I'm not one of those rich, upper-class politicians from an Ivy League school. I'm a normal girl.'...
"And smart enough to know how to market herself. A month ago, Carey took to the streets of Los Angeles in a bikini top, Tommy Hilfiger shorts, and 4-inch-high platform sandals to collect the 65 signatures needed to qualify for the recall ballot. She stopped traffic; she drew cameras; she got on the ballot."
And she got in the Weekly Standard!
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