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

To: Lane3 who wrote (24196)	1/13/2004 5:31:52 PM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 794327

Podhoretz examines the Election outcome alternatives. I suspect the anti-Israel outlook of the left is translating into a permanent shift of Jewish votes to the right. Very much like what happened in the South to the Black vote in the 60s. NY Post '04: WATERSHED? January 13, 2004 -- THERE is a possibility - not a likelihood, but a strong possibility - that Election Day 2004 will be a watershed, a transformative moment, in American history. There are two watershed scenarios: 1) Howard Dean wins having run as the most unabashedly left-wing candidate since George McGovern in 1972. Or: 2) George W. Bush wins in a landslide. A Dean victory would be a watershed because it would be seen as a national rejection of the hard-charging Bush-GOP approach to governance. Dean would ascend to the Oval Office having sworn to raise taxes - ending the doctrine in place since 1984 that says nobody can win an election by promising to increase the American tax burden. And (far more important) Dean's election would be seen as decisive repudiation of Bush's approach to the War on Terror. His victory would bring an end to the Republicans' unquestioned 35-year dominance on the question of which party does a better job of keeping America safe and strong. Dean would have beaten a sitting president in the midst of an economic recovery and after victory in two wars. Even if he wins by only 930 votes, as Bush did in 2000, there will be no arguing the point. The Bush administration and the GOP Congress have put it all on the line these past years - from the tough line in the War on Terror to the tax cuts to the Big Government solutions on health care and education. A loss would destroy Republican self-confidence and indicate that the American people are eager for a different kind of governing ideology. A razor-thin Bush win wouldn't mean anything near as much as a razor-thin Dean victory. The president is the front-runner by a 20-point margin right now; if he merely prevails in November by a point or two, he'd only be getting a passing grade from the American people - not a ringing mandate. But if the president wins in a landslide - by eight points or more - then the November election will be the undoing of the present-day Democratic Party. Such a victory would almost certainly ensure that the Republican majorities in the House of Representatives and the Senate would grow. Americans would be making a clear and decisive ideological choice - not only embracing the president and his agenda, but tossing Howard and the Deaniacs onto the ash heap of history. A fascinating poll released yesterday by the American Jewish Committee indicates just how difficult a path the Democrats have in front of them. It shows that 31 percent of American Jews intend to vote for Bush in November. Doesn't sound like much? It's a huge swing in Bush's favor: He only got 19 percent of the Jewish vote in 2000. The president has increased his support in this critical Democratic constituency by 50 percent in three years' time. And, as Matthew Brooks of the Republican Jewish Coalition notes, the poll was taken before Saddam Hussein's capture and the subsequent decline (by 22 percent) in violence against U.S. forces in Iraq. Thus, Brooks believes, Bush begins 2004 with what appears to be a base of Jewish support that can only grow over the course of the year if things go well for him. If Jews, whose margins of support for Democrats from 1988 onward were in the 80 percent to 90 percent range, are moving in a Republican direction, that might be a harbinger of doom for any Democratic candidate. Bush's increase in Jewish support might be an indicator of a blowout to come - but it also means that Bush is far better situated to win a close election. There are about 400,000 Jewish voters in South Florida - and if Bush wins a greater percentage of them than he did the last time, he will win the state decisively. The same is true in Ohio and Pennsylvania - two other incredibly close swing states with a few hundred thousand Jewish voters each. (New York? It's the most significant Jewish voting state, with more than 1 million adults of Jewish descent on the voter rolls. But even if Bush garners 100,000 new votes in November here, he doesn't have much hope of carrying the increasingly Democratic state. After all, he lost by more than a million votes in 2000.) At the very least, the Jewish surge for Bush will require Democrats to fight for votes they used to be able to take for granted. And it's a possibility - not a likelihood, not a probability, but a possibility - that the Jewish surge is an early sign of a massive Democratic meltdown come November. E-mail: podhoretz@nypost.com NEW YORK POST

To: Lane3 who wrote (24196)	1/13/2004 10:02:29 PM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 794327

This book was one day of "Gotcha" and has legs for a week. Then it's gone. Rumsfeld: O'Neill's Claims Invalid (CBS/AP) Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill denied on Tuesday that classified documents were used in a new tell-all book about his two years in the administration while Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld challenged his assertion that Bush was planning from the outset to oust Saddam Hussein. Reacting to an announcement by the Treasury Department that it was launching an inspector general's investigation into how an agency document stamped "secret" wound up being used in his interview Sunday night on CBS News' 60 Minutes, O'Neill said, "The truth is, I didn't take any documents at all." In the 60 Minutes interview, O'Neill said that at Mr. Bush's very first National Security Council meeting, "there was a conviction, that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go." "It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The president saying 'Go find me a way to do this,'" says O'Neill. Interviewed on NBC's "Today" show Tuesday, O'Neill said he had asked the Treasury Department's chief legal counsel "to have the documents that are OK for me to have" for use in the book by former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind entitled, "The Price of Loyalty." In the interview, 60 Minutes Correspondent Lesley Stahl said O'Neill had got briefing materials involving Iraq. Suskind said: "There are memos. One of them, marked secret, says 'Plan for post-Saddam Iraq.'" A spokesman for 60 Minutes said only a cover sheet of the briefing materials was shown. Meanwhile, Rumsfeld told reporters at the Pentagon that the depiction in the book of a President Bush who was detached from policymaking and governed in a White House driven by politics was "night and day" different from his experience. "I certainly don't see any validity to his criticism of the president at all," Rumsfeld said. "I really feel fortunate to be working with a man of his character and ability." Rumsfeld confirmed that he had called O'Neill when he heard he was participating in a book that might be critical of the administration and had tried to convince his longtime friend not to go through with the project. Rumsfeld said he was told by O'Neill that the book would be about "policy and substance." Reacting to O'Neill's assertion that Bush had begun planning for regime change in Iraq long before the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Rumsfeld said that Bush made the decision to go to war in March 2003 "after trying everything else in the world." O'Neill, asked if he thought the internal Treasury probe was a get-even move by the administration, replied, "I don't think so. If I were secretary of the treasury and these circumstances occurred, I would have asked the inspector general to look into it." But O'Neill also said he thinks the questions could have been more readily answered if top Treasury officials had talked to the agency's legal counsel. "I'm surprised that he didn't call the chief legal counsel," O'Neill said of his successor, Treasury Secretary John Snow. O'Neill said a cover page for the documents might have suggested they were classified material but said that the legal counsel's office "sent me a couple CDs, which I never opened." He said he gave them Suskind. "I don't think there is anything that is classified in those 19,000 documents," O'Neill said, predicting the Treasury investigation would show that the Treasury employees who collected the materials for him had followed the law. O'Neill, who was fired by Bush in December 2002, is quoted in the book as saying the president was focused on removing Saddam from the start of his administration. "This is an administration, remember, that is very sensitive to the notion of leaks in part because of the ongoing investigation into the apparent leak of the name of that CIA agent last year," notes CBS News legal analyst Andrew Cohen. O'Neill also said Tuesday said he did not mean to imply that the administration was wrong to begin contingency planning for a regime change in Iraq but that he was surprised that it was at the top of the agenda at the first Cabinet meeting. O'Neill, in the book, contends the administration's decision-making process was often chaotic and Bush Cabinet meetings made the president look "like a blind man in a room full of deaf people." O'Neill told the "Today" show he was guilty of using some "vivid" language during his hundreds of hours of interviews with Suskind for the book. "If I could take it back, I would take it back," he said of the blind man quote. Asked if he plans to vote for Bush in November's presidential election, O'Neill said he "probably" would. "I don't see anyone who is better prepared or more capable," he told NBC. In Mexico for the Summit of the Americas meeting, Bush offered a forceful defense of his decision to go to war against Iraq, saying, "the decision I made is the right one for America" and for the world. Asked specifically whether O'Neill was correct in saying that planning for the war had begun far ahead of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Bush said that when he had become president he had inherited a policy of "regime change" from former President Clinton and had decided to adopt it as his own. ©MMIV, CBS Broadcasting Inc.