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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (20671)	6/11/2006 7:53:21 AM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541202

How to Reconnect With Voters and Realize Your Dreams of Victory A Step-by-Step Guide for Democrats By Michael Grunwald Sunday, June 11, 2006; B01 These are dark days for the Republican Party. Voters are angry at the government over the war in Iraq, the price of gas, Capitol Hill corruption, out-of-control spending, the Dubai port deal -- and Republicans control the government. They failed to deliver Social Security reform or ethics reform, and now they're failing to deliver immigration reform. After Katrina and Haditha, NSA wiretapping and CIA bungling, President Bush's approval ratings have sunk to Jimmy Carter levels. As the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal spreads, the GOP congressional leadership's ratings are approaching O.J. Simpson levels. And now the Fed is warning that the economy may tank. So the political pundits, as always, want to know: What's wrong with the Democrats? It may seem like an odd question, now that polls show voters trust Democrats more than Republicans on every major issue -- including national security. But even Democrats -- especially Democrats -- seem to think their party is uniquely capable of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory this fall. And all around the Beltway and the blogosphere, every self-flagellating Democratic expert seems to know why. The problem with Democrats is that they're too liberal. Or not liberal enough. They talk too much (or not enough) about abortion or torture or gun control. They're too condescending, too cosmopolitan, too secular, too wonkish, too weak. They've been captured by their interest groups, their contributors, their pollsters, their consultants. They're on the wrong side of a demographic revolution. Joe Sixpack doesn't want to have a beer with them. They should think strategically instead of tactically, or they should forget about strategy and speak from the heart. They aren't catering to values voters, heartland voters, exurban voters. They aren't motivating their base. They don't have a unified national message, or they're too worried about a unified national message. They need to do more than criticize Bush, or stop rolling over for Bush. They're too disconnected to understand what voters want to hear, or too cowardly to say things voters don't want to hear. They should imitate the Republican intellectual infrastructure that produces the conservative movement's big ideas, or imitate the Republican anti-intellectual attitude that doesn't worry about big ideas. Or they should stop imitating Republicans. It can seem confusing, all this contradictory advice. But most of it reveals more about the biases of the advice-givers than it reveals about the party's prospects of regaining power. Today's Republican Party is a mishmash of schisms -- between social conservatives and moderates, foreign-policy interventionists and realists, Wall Street and Main Street and K Street. Today's Democratic Party has just one basic schism, between liberals and centrists. But that schism -- reflected in an avalanche of recent books, articles and blogs -- helps explain most of the party's soul-searching: Liberals want the party to be more liberal. Centrists want the party to be more centrist. And those biases tend to translate into diagnoses of the party's ailments, and prescriptions for cures. For example, liberal analysts usually argue that Democrats need to tack left to fire up their base, instead of blindly following the centrist Democratic Leadership Council. Markos Moulitsas, the proprietor of the Daily Kos blog and coauthor of "Crashing the Gate," is more pragmatic than his critics suggest, but he generally argues that Democrats should do more to distinguish themselves from Republicans, that their core supporters have been discouraged by me-too DLC types who supported Bush's tax cuts and the Iraq war. In "Hostile Takeover," former congressional aide David Sirota goes even further, accusing DLC free-traders of ruining the party by selling out to corporate donors, "even as polls show Americans want Democrats to start standing up for people's economic rights." Predictably, centrist analysts usually argue that Democrats need to tack right to reach out to swing voters. In their book "Take It Back," James Carville and Paul Begala urge Democrats to moderate or at least play down their support for abortion, gay rights and gun control; they also tell the party's liberal interest groups -- civil rights advocates, labor unions, environmentalists -- to "back off a bit." Jeffrey Goldberg recently suggested similar strategies in a New Yorker article highlighting moderate red-state Democrats complaining about their tone-deaf, anti-gun, pro-abortion party establishment. Karl Rove may win elections with a base strategy, but as Goldberg notes, the Democratic base of liberals, one-fifth of the country, is a lot smaller than the Republican base of conservatives, one-third of the country. A recent DLC study called "Growing the Vote" suggests that as traditionally liberal urban cores lose population, Democrats need to reshape their messages to appeal to fast-growing (and more conservative) exurbs. Most internal Democratic debates are disguised variations on that center-left theme. On national security, for example, moderate analysts urge Democrats to convince Americans that they're patriotic, that they support the military, that they'll win the fight against terrorism. To the extent that they want to hear about Iraq, they urge Democrats to call for "competence" and "victory," not retreat. "The American electorate will not turn over national leadership to a party it does not trust to defend the country and lead our military," the DLC's think tank warned in "With All Our Might," a series of muscle-flexing essays with a stern-looking Uncle Sam on the cover. The red-state Democrats made similar points to Goldberg, complaining that Democrats sound like they hate America when they attack domestic surveillance or the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. "We make a mistake if we think that just because people are fed up with George Bush they want George McGovern," one centrist said. But progressives believe McGovern was right about the war in Vietnam, and they point out that most Americans now oppose the war in Iraq, including some of the pundit-hawks who warned that opposing the war would doom Democrats in 2004. (They're especially irked at New Republic columnist Peter Beinart, who admits in "The Good Fight" that he was wrong to support the invasion, but still warns that knee-jerk antiwar sentiment in an age of jihad could doom Democrats.) The left says America is yearning for "straight talk" about the quagmire unfolding in Iraq -- attacks on the war's rationale, and plans for swift withdrawal. They argue that the reluctance of leading Democrats to condemn the war is symptomatic of their general reluctance to say what they really believe, a reluctance that ultimately gets punished at the polls. Similarly, lefties argue that Democrats should stop soft-pedaling their opposition to conservative Republicans on issues such as gay marriage, school prayer, immigration and especially the economy. They call for a new Democratic populism -- promoted by author Thomas Frank in his best-selling book "What's the Matter With Kansas?" -- that would win back working-class and middle-class voters with unapologetic appeals to their economic interests. They say Democrats have pulled punches to avoid being accused of "class warfare," even though Republicans started the class war by cutting taxes for the rich and showering subsidies on corporations. Democratic consultant Robert Shrum is the best-known purveyor of this theme, famously framing races as clashes of "the people vs. the powerful." There is something comical about liberal assumptions that centrist Democrats must be hiding their true beliefs for political reasons, but many centrists do see class-war populism as a recipe for political disaster. They argue that Americans respond to optimistic we're-all-in-this-together messages, not old-fashioned rich-bashing. And they don't think anything is wrong with Kansas; their problem is city-slicker Democrats who see evangelicals as rubes, gun owners as Neanderthals and the heartland as flyover country. If Kansans don't like elitist Democrats who don't respect rural values, that's the party's fault. This is the main conceit of Goldberg's article; it starts with Teresa Heinz Kerry urging a group of Missouri farmers to go organic. "It's a tone thing," Missouri U.S. Senate candidate Claire McCaskill (D) told Goldberg. "It's the 'We know better' thing." Another centrist complained that Democrats try to persuade New Hampshire voters to support income taxes, instead of recognizing that they hate income taxes and campaigning accordingly. Then again, one man's condescension is another man's leadership; centrists loved it when Bill Clinton criticized rapper Sister Souljah in front of a black audience. They didn't attack Clinton for disrespecting black values. And liberals didn't praise his "straight talk." Democrats don't always provide ideologically self-serving advice; for example, liberal Michael Tomasky's recent American Prospect article urging Democrats to adopt a "common good" philosophy echoed some centrist frustration with single-issue interest groups. But it's usually moderates who want Democrats to be less elitist, less negative, more respectful of red-state values, more . . . moderate. It's usually liberals who want Democrats to be less apologetic, less wishy-washy, more willing to speak truth to power, more . . . liberal. There's a telling example in Joe Klein's new book "Politics Lost," which skewers consultants in general and Shrum in particular. Klein hates the way consultants drain the humanity out of their candidates, forcing them to repeat poll-tested platitudes; Klein, a journalist, assumes voters share his journalistic aversion to hearing the same pablum over and over. He especially hates Shrum's "the people vs. the powerful" riff; the centrist Klein assumes voters share his centrist aversion to class-war politics. Instead, he yearns for a more spontaneous politics, and he thinks America does, too. His most prominent example is Al Gore's passionate make-out session with his wife before his convention speech in 2000: "It said to the world that maybe Al Gore wasn't such a stiff after all." Klein notes that Gore's poll ratings quickly shot up 12 to 17 points, and quotes a Shrum rival attributing the bounce to the kiss. It makes sense to be skeptical of Shrum's influence on the Democratic Party; he has an unblemished record of advising failed presidential candidates, and making buckets of money doing so. But though Klein rejects the notion, it's possible that voters may have noticed the content of Gore's speech as well as the smooch that preceded it. Its main theme: the people vs. the powerful. It's understandable that moderate pundits want moderate policies, liberal pundits want liberal policies, and Democratic candidates find it hard to choose. In a nation evenly split along partisan lines, anything they do to mobilize their base could alienate the center, and vice versa. But Republicans face the same quandary. And they're the ones in trouble. So here's a radical thought: Maybe there's nothing wrong with the Democrats, politically speaking. They've won the popular vote in three of the past four presidential elections. Their one outright loser was Sen. John F. Kerry, who had the liberal voting record that moderates warn about and the inability to take a stand that liberals warn about. Voters -- even his supporters -- told pollsters they didn't like him. But they weren't turned off by his entire party; Democrats won Senate races in red states such as Colorado and Arkansas in 2004, and ran far ahead of Kerry in South Dakota and Kentucky. So how did Kerry become the party's standard-bearer? Democrats in Iowa and New Hampshire, liberal and moderate, thought a military veteran had the best chance to beat Bush. They analyzed the political landscape, tried to imagine what the American people wanted in a president and voted accordingly. Their analysis just happened to be wrong. They voted, in other words, like pundits. Maybe that's what's wrong with the Democrats. grunwaldmr@washpost.com Michael Grunwald is a Washington Post staff writer.

To: Lane3 who wrote (20671)	6/11/2006 10:13:47 AM
From: Dale Baker	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 541202

The other interesting question - can Gore win Florida and Tennessee this time as Mr. Global Warming Dude? I am skeptical.

To: Lane3 who wrote (20671)	6/12/2006 1:57:49 PM
From: Alastair McIntosh	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 541202

You are probably really sick of this topic, but here is another comment on Gore's self-described truth. The gods are laughing Scientists who work in the fields liberal arts graduate Al Gore wanders through contradict his theories about man-induced climate change Tom Harris - National Post Wednesday, June 07, 2006 CREDIT: Shannon Stapleton, Reuters Al Gore lectures... Albert Einstein once said, "Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of truth and knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods." While the gods must consider An Inconvenient Truth the ultimate comedy, real climate scientists are crying over Al Gore's new film. This is not just because the ex-vice-president commits numerous basic science mistakes. They are also concerned that many in the media and public will fail to realize that this film amounts to little more than science fiction. Gore's credibility is damaged early in the film when he tells the audience that, by simply looking at Antarctic ice cores with the naked eye, one can see when the American Clean Air Act was passed. Dr. Ian Clark, professor of Earth Sciences at the University of Ottawa (U of O) responds, "This is pure fantasy unless the reporter is able to detect parts per billion changes to chemicals in ice." Air over the United States doesn't even circulate to the Antarctic before mixing with most of the northern, then the southern, hemisphere air, and this process takes decades. Clark explains that even far more significant events, such as the settling of dust arising from the scouring of continental shelves at the end of ice ages, are undetectable in ice cores by an untrained eye. Gore repeatedly labels carbon dioxide as "global warming pollution" when, in reality, it is no more pollution than is oxygen. CO2 is plant food, an ingredient essential for photosynthesis without which Earth would be a lifeless, frozen ice ball. The hypothesis that human release of CO2 is a major contributor to global warming is just that -- an unproven hypothesis, against which evidence is increasingly mounting. In fact, the correlation between CO2 and temperature that Gore speaks about so confidently is simply non-existent over all meaningful time scales. U of O climate researcher Professor Jan Veizer demonstrated that, over geologic time, the two are not linked at all. Over the intermediate time scales Gore focuses on, the ice cores show that CO2 increases don't precede, and therefore don't cause, warming. Rather, they follow temperature rise -- by as much as 800 years. Even in the past century, the correlation is poor; the planet actually cooled between 1940 and 1980, when human emissions of CO2 were rising at the fastest rate in our history. Similarly, the fact that water vapour constitutes 95% of greenhouse gases by volume is conveniently ignored by Gore. While humanity's three billion tonnes (gigatonnes, or GT) per year net contribution to the atmosphere's CO2 load appears large on a human scale, it is actually less than half of 1% of the atmosphere's total CO2 content (750-830 GT). The CO2 emissions of our civilization are also dwarfed by the 210 GT/year emissions of the gas from Earth's oceans and land. Perhaps even more significant is the fact that the uncertainty in the measurement of atmospheric CO2 content is 80 GT -- making three GT seem hardly worth mentioning. But Gore persists, labeling future CO2 rises as "deeply unethical" and lectures the audience, "Each one of us is a cause of global warming." Not satisfied with simply warning of human-induced killer heat waves -- events in Europe this past year were "like a nature hike through the Book of Revelations," he says -- he then uses high-tech special effects to show how human-caused climate changes are causing more hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, floods, infectious diseases, insect plagues, glacial retreats, coral die-outs and the flooding of small island nations due to sea level rise caused by the melting of the polar caps. One is left wondering if Gore thinks nature is responsible for anything. Scientists who actually work in these fields flatly contradict Gore. Take his allegations that extreme weather (EW) events will increase in frequency and severity as the world warms and that this is already happening. Former professor of climatology at the University of Winnipeg Dr. Tim Ball notes, "The theories that Gore supports indicate the greatest warming will be in polar regions. Therefore, the temperature contrast with warmer regions -- the driver of extreme weather -- will lessen and, with it, storm potential will lessen." This is exactly what former Environment Canada research scientist and EW specialist Dr. Madhav Khandekar found. His studies show there has been no increase in EW events in Canada in the past 25 years. Furthermore, he sees no indication that such events will increase over the next 25 years. "In fact, some EW events such as winter blizzards have definitely declined," Khandekar says. "Prairie droughts have been occurring for hundreds of years. The 13th and 16th century saw some of the severest and longest droughts ever on Canadian/American prairies." Like many other researchers, Khandekar is convinced that EW is not increasing globally, either. On hurricanes, Gore implies that new records are being set as a result of human greenhouse gas emissions. Besides clumsy errors in the presentation of the facts (Katrina did not get "stronger and stronger and stronger" as it came over the Gulf of Mexico; rather, it was category 5 over the ocean and was downgraded to category 3 when it made a landfall), Gore fails to note that the only region to show an increase in hurricanes in recent years is the North Atlantic. Hurricane specialist Tad Murty, former senior research scientist Department of Fisheries and Oceans and now adjust professor of Earth sciences at U of O, points out, "In all other six ocean basins where tropical cyclones occur, there is either a flat or a downward trend." Murty lists 1900, 1926 and 1935 as the years in which the most intense hurricanes were recorded in the United States. In fact, Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Center in Miami, has stated that global warming has nothing to do with the recent increase in hurricane frequency in the North Atlantic. Murty concludes, "The feeling among many meteorologists is that it has to do with the North Atlantic oscillation, which is now in the positive phase and will continue for another decade or so." In their open letter to the Prime Minister in April, 61 of the world's leading experts modestly expressed their understanding of the science: "The study of global climate change is an 'emerging science,' one that is perhaps the most complex ever tackled. It may be many years yet before we properly understand the Earth's climate system." It seems that liberal arts graduate Al Gore, political champion of the Kyoto Protocol, thinks he knows better. Institut Pasteur (Paris) Professor Paul Reiter seemed to sum up the sentiments of many experts when he labelled the film "pure, mind-bending propaganda." Such reactions should certainly cause Canadians to wonder if Nobel Prize-winning French novelist Andre Gide had a point when he advised, "Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it." - Tom Harris is a mechanical engineer and Ottawa director of High Park Group, a public affairs and public policy company. SEA LEVEL FALLING, POLAR BEARS STABLE, ICE CAPS THICKENING ... "I can assure Mr. Gore that no one from the South Pacific islands has fled to New Zealand because of rising seas. In fact, if Gore consults the data, he will see it shows sea level falling in some parts of the Pacific." -- Dr. Chris de Freitas, climate scientist, associate professor, University of Auckland, N.Z. - - - "We find no alarming sea level rise going on, in the Maldives, Tovalu, Venice, the Persian Gulf and even satellite altimetry, if applied properly." -- Dr. Nils-Axel Morner, emeritus professor of paleogeophysics and geodynamics, Stockholm University, Sweden. - - - "Gore is completely wrong here -- malaria has been documented at an altitude of 2,500 metres -- Nairobi and Harare are at altitudes of about 1,500 metres. The new altitudes of malaria are lower than those recorded 100 years ago. None of the "30 so-called new diseases" Gore references are attributable to global warming, none." -- Dr. Paul Reiter, professor, Institut Pasteur, unit of insects and infectious diseases, Paris, comments on Gore's belief that Nairobi and Harare were founded just above the mosquito line to avoid malaria and how the mosquitoes are now moving to higher altitudes. - - - "Our information is that seven of 13 populations of polar bears in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago (more than half the world's estimated total) are either stable or increasing..... Of the three that appear to be declining, only one has been shown to be affected by climate change. No one can say with certainty that climate change has not affected these other populations, but it is also true that we have no information to suggest that it has." -- Dr. Mitchell Taylor, manager, wildlife research section, Department of Environment, Igloolik, Nunavut. - - - "Mr. Gore suggests that the Greenland melt area increased considerably between 1992 and 2005. But 1992 was exceptionally cold in Greenland and the melt area of ice sheet was exceptionally low due to the cooling caused by volcanic dust emitted from Mt. Pinatubo. If, instead of 1992, Gore had chosen for comparison the year 1991, one in which the melt area was 1% higher than in 2005, he would have to conclude that the ice sheet melt area is shrinking and that perhaps a new Ice Age is just around the corner." -- Dr. Petr Chylek, adjunct professor, Department of Physics and Atmospheric Science, Dalhousie University, Halifax. - - - "The oceans are now heading into one of their periodic phases of cooling.... Modest changes in temperature are not about to wipe them [coral] out. Neither will increased carbon dioxide, which is a fundamental chemical building block that allows coral reefs to exist at all." -- Dr. Gary D. Sharp, Center for Climate/Ocean Resources Study, Salinas, Calif. - - - "Both the Antarctic and Greenland ice caps are thickening. The temperature at the South Pole has declined by more than one degree C since 1950. And the area of sea ice around the continent has increased over the last 20 years." -- Dr. R.M. Carter, professor, Marine Geophysical Laboratory, James Cook University, Townsville, Australia. - - - "From data published by the Canadian Ice Service, there has been no precipitous drop-off in the amount or thickness of the ice cap since 1970 when reliable overall coverage became available for the Canadian Arctic." -- Dr./Cdr. M.R. Morgan, FRMS, formerly advisor to the World Meteorological Organization/climatology research scientist at University of Exeter, U.K. - - - "The MPB (mountain pine beetle) is a species native to this part of North America and is always present. The MPB epidemic started as comparatively small outbreaks and through forest management inaction got completely out of hand." -- Rob Scagel, M.Sc., forest microclimate specialist, Pacific Phytometric Consultants, Surrey, B.C., comments on Gore's belief that the mountain pine beetle is an "invasive exotic species" that has become a plague due to fewer days of frost. Ran with fact box "Sea Level Falling, Polar Bears Stable, Ice Caps Thickening ..." which has been appended to the story. © National Post 2006