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

To: LindyBill who wrote (79577)	10/21/2004 8:48:50 PM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 794009

As I have said before, this year the Dems became a branch of the MSM. Michael Barone on the State of the Race BLOGS FOR BUSH Michael Barone has long been one of my favorite MSM commentators - in a swamp of incompetants and ideologues, he's the voice of reason. Over at US News he's got a long but exceptionally interesting article on where we stand with the election less than two weeks away. I recommend reading the whole thing, but this is the part that really struck me: 'It seems curious that the percentages of the incumbent should rise while the percentages of the challenger have not risen much if at all. As a general proposition, you expect an incumbent's standing to change less, because voters already know much more about him than about his opponent. But that hasn't happened this time. My tentative explanation is this. Bush's most effective opposition this year has come not from Kerry and the Democrats but from Old Media, the New York Times and the news pages of the Washington Post, along with the broadcast networks ABC, CBS, and NBC. Old Media gave very heavy coverage to stories that tended to hurt Bush—violence in Iraq, Abu Ghraib, the false charges of Richard Clarke and Joseph Wilson, etc. And during the first eight months of the year Bush did a poor job of making his case. Then, suddenly, that case was made with maximum effectiveness at the Republican National Convention in New York—by John McCain and Rudolph Giuliani, by Zell Miller and Arnold Schwarzenegger, by Laura Bush and Dick Cheney and George W. Bush himself. Bush was able to get his message out unmediated by Old Media. (Fox News Channel had more viewers during the Republican National Convention than any of the old-line broadcast networks.) The message was simple: We need this president to protect the nation. Bush muffed the chance to deliver that message effectively in the first debate. But he made up for it in the second and third debates.' Emphasis added by me. Mr. Barone does an excellent job here, but he doesn't draw the final conclusion as he should - and you can tell when you read the whole thing that he was just a step away from doing it, but probably drew back out of an overdeveloped sense of caution: Seeing as the MSM have pretty much carried Kerry's water this whole election cycle - meaning that without the actions of the MSM, it would have been an easy blow-out for President Bush - we must presume that the polls we're seeing also have a large amount of MSM boosterism for Kerry. Mr. Barone says he doesn't think this is true, but to his credit he links to another blogger who does. My father, among many other talents, is a statistician - meaning a major number cruncher; one thing he has always advised me is that any half-clever pollster can game the results pretty much any way he wants to. My addendum to this view is that while polls can lie, the aggregate of all polls tend to reflect at least the main truth - this is why Real Clear Politics polling aggregate is so invaluable - and as Mr. Barone points out, the trendline in the RCP aggregate has been for a steady lead by President Bush ever since Labor Day. What does it all mean? Prepare for some pleasant surprises, Republicans.

To: LindyBill who wrote (79577)	10/22/2004 12:51:33 AM
From: Nadine Carroll	Respond to of 794009

So, much to my dismay, Dems have let themselves be cornered into arguing only tactics (much like Anonymous's book, another in a long list of downer volumes designed to make Americans feel bad and stupid about the world-a winning tactic in motivating the public toward sacrifice if ever there was one), while the Republicans own the market on vision and happy endings Hasn't this been the Democrats' problem ever since Vietnam? They could do globalizaton under Clinton because it was almost all peaceful (and before you quote me Bosnia, note how terrified Clinton was of body bags, how every atempt was made to fight from 30,000 feet); but if the grand strategy calls for actual fighting and dying, immediately they have a big problem with both their base and their credibility. It was that way in the 80s too, when their fear of any confrontation with the Soviets made them see the Cold War purely in terms of managing it indefinitely, never of winning. This self-imposed limitation on the available options prevents the Democrats from proposing anything more than hunkering down and going only after the specific terrorists, not the states that harbor them.

To: LindyBill who wrote (79577)	10/22/2004 4:54:33 AM
From: greenspirit	Respond to of 794009

Barnett like allot of academically orientated writers, confuses a straight forward approach with "simplicity". The Presidents approach to go after the terrorists and in the process create the conditions in which democracy and liberty over time change the hearts and minds of the people in the Middle East is anything but simplistic. One of the great thinkers of our time Russel Ackoff once wrote something that went like this... Whenever I had a student giving his PHD dissertation who couldn't explain his thesis to the point that I could understand it, whether it be molecular biology, physics, or systems dynamics, I knew the person didn't really know the material well. One form of intelligence is being able to take the complex and make it understandable. People who really know something are able to do this with relative ease. Far too many people in the media and liberal academia, completely fail to grasp this concept. Especially, the ones I read and hear in Europe.