An hour ago, blogger N.Z. Bear e-mailed his Rightblogs ListServ to decry “defeatist rhetoric” about Iraq. Here’s what he wrote (reprinted with permission):
We must use whatever power we have to ensure that our wobbly political class doesn’t rob the troops in the field of the chance to win. That doesn’t mean blind obedience to the administration’s position, but it does mean combating the defeatist rhetoric that is now beginning to come from even Republican corners.
I asked N.Z. if by “defeatist rhetoric” he means that there are no honest arguments for any form of withdrawal? He responded as follows:
Not at all. But when people say thin[g]s (a la Harry Reid) like “the war is lost,” I’d call that defeatist. And I’d call [Senator] Lugar’s recent call for withdrawal because he thinks the surge isn’t working—after mere weeks—defeatist as well.
I’m open to being convinced that we’ve lost the war and have been defeated. But I’ve yet to see any genuinely serious arguments to that end…
Without wading into the question of whether the U.S. has been “defeated” in Iraq (I prefer to ask if our presence there is worthwhile?), I strongly object to the word “defeatist,” because it implies that anyone who isn’t Cheney-esque about the war is actually hoping for an American defeat. People can reasonably disagree about our prospects for victory, but to impugn the motives of those with whom you disagree in this way is vicious and vacuous.
I’ll leave the last words to Senator Chuck Hagel:
I am not, nor any member of Congress that I’m aware of, Tim, is advocating defeat. That’s ridiculous, and I’m offended that any responsible member of Congress or anyone else would even suggest such a thing.
Addendum: N.Z. responds:
My quick response, for the record, is that “defeatist rhetoric” doesn’t necessarily mean the speaker wishes for defeat—it means that the rhetoric itself makes it more likely that we will be defeated (by encouraging our enemy / discouraging ourselves). I’m not interested in or trying to attack someone[']s motives or inner feelings—I’m interested in the results of their actions.
That of course doesn’t mean I never want to hear anything bad said about the war, but I expect that if someone like a U.S. Senator is going to say something bad, that it should be clearly based in fact and constructive. (Reid and Lugar’s comments both fail that test in my mind.)
This is an important distinction, but it leaves a couple questions:
1. What about Lugar’s critique is un-factual and unconstructive? Here’s what he said: “The president has the opportunity now to bring about a bipartisan foreign policy. I don’t think he’ll have that option very long.”
(Lugar added, “Those who offer constructive criticism of the surge strategy are not defeatists, any more than those who warn against a precipitous withdrawal are militarists.”)
2. What is the responsibility of a member of a Congress who strongly believes the war is lost? If he speaks out, then, according to N.Z., he hurts the troops. But if he holds his breath, he betrays his conscience and surrenders leadership. Note: now that we’re more than four years into the war, the usual answer—that he should express his disagreement in private—is obsolete.
According to Politico, Ralph Nader is “seriously considering” re-running for president (when is not not?). Recalling the 2000 election—where had just 538 people who voted for Nader in Florida voted instead for Al Gore, George W. Bush would have not become president—Democrats are again imploring the lefty activist to stay on the sidelines.
“His entry into the race . . . . would be just another vainglorious effort to promote himself at the expense of the best interests of the public,” opines Chris Lehane, a prominent Democratic strategist.
This is a classic case of blaming the messenger. Nader never forced anyone to vote for him. To the contrary, he simply offered what some considered to be an attractive alternative. Plus, as with all third-party candidates, anyone who voted for him likely did so thoughtfully. As such, people should direct their ire not at the candidate but at those who campaigned for him and pulled a lever bearing his name.
Indeed, whatever constitutes the public’s so-called best interests is for voters, not wonks, to decide.
Example: 17-year-old boy has consensual oral sex with a 15-year-old girl. Boy is convicted of molestation under a Georgia statute (since revised), and sentenced to 10 years in prison. Judge overturns sentence, but state attorney general appeals, out of duty to the laws “as they are written, not how some may wish they were written.”
This is a classic half-truth, for
Prosecutors have enormous discretion in when and how and against whom they bring charges. They can overcharge and pressure the defendant to plea bargain. They can undercharge if they feel there are mitigating circumstances associated with the crime. Or they can determine that despite the fact that a crime has been committed, in the interest of justice, charges ought not be brought at all.
What’s more, every prosecutor’s office battles with limited resources. A prosecutor can’t possibly enforce each law against each person who breaks it. So prosecutors set priorities. And in choosing which laws they will enforce vigorously and which laws they will let slide, they make public policy.
Yet the problems run deeper than runaway prosecutors. The problem is the institutionally entrenched notion that no one ever lost re-election for being “tough on crime.” In Radley’s words,
Many prosecutors and politicians have unfortunately come to measure success in our criminal justice system by the number of people they put in jail. Criminal laws—particularly those pertaining to drug and sex crimes—are increasingly written with extraordinary breadth and reach. Police officers typically are rewarded for arrests, not for preventing crimes. Prosecutors tend to be promoted or re-elected based on their ability to win convictions, not their fairness or sense of justice. Appeals courts, meanwhile, generally focus on constitutional and procedural issues. Only in extreme cases will an appellate court review the appropriateness of a verdict.
From the writing of laws to their enforcement and prosecution, our system has evolved to the point where justice, mercy and fairness often go overlooked. It’s no surprise that the U.S. leads the world in its rate of incarceration, and by a wide margin.
To both protect oneself and to target one’s opponent, David All has proposed “five essential tips for the YouTube campaign trail.” His suggestions are groundbreaking and thoughtful, but I’d like to add one more, albeit unrelated to YouTube: Develop software to download your opponent’s Web site once a day. You need not download the whole site, but, like a good backup program, only the pages that have changed since the last download.
Savvy readers will point out that Google already caches pages for free. In fact, Google’s cache was the source of this gotcha blog post by the Politico’s Ben Smith. This method is fine if you know that a change occurred within the past week or so, but if you don’t, your only other option is the Wayback Machine, which archives entire sites, but only twice a year.
Hence the aforementioned software. As Ryan Lizza of the New Republicreported yesterday, a rival campaign of Bill Richardson’s dug back a month and a half to document a change in the governor’s seven-part plan for Iraq. In short, as of May 12, Richardson explicitly supported the Feingold-Reid amendment, which would cut off funds for the war next March. Today, the same page has been scrubbed of such support.
After-the-fact editing, whether of a Web page, a profile of oneself or even the congressional record, is all-too-common. What’s new is the increasingly comprehensive ability to play gotcha! This is not a necessarily healthy development—such microscopic scrutiny promotes perfunctory rather than spontaneous campaigning—but it’s a fait accompli.
Addendum (6/29/2007): Via e-mail, Josh Levy, of techPresident, expresses reservations about my proposal (which I submitted to tP). Josh likens this to “a version of politics that we’re hoping the Web—by giving the voters more control of the political process—will help undo.” He adds, “Without sacrificing the open Web, there appears little we can do to stop it.”
Not wanting to promote “gotcha-ism” is perfectly understandable—and I wholeheartedly share Josh’s hope for less politics-as-usual—but I think the idea that the Internet will “undo” opposition research is like asking rain not to fall.
In his latest column, Tom Friedman observes that the Web’s empowerment of every individual to self-publish puts us all ill at ease, constantly on a possible stage. Unfortunately, the “good” empowerment (say, making government spending more transparent, a la last year’s Coburn-Obama bill) cannot be separated from the “bad.”
Furthermore, while my proposal is admittedly akin to bottom-feeding, I don’t think it constitutes gaming the system. In fact, it behooves candidates today to take advantage of every opportunity the Internet provides—whether it’s bringing together one’s supporters (a la Ron Paul), introducing politics to the apolitical (Obama), or compiling oppo (Richardson’s rival).
In college, I subscribed to the idealist school of foreign policy. After I graduated, however, my preparation for a debate on U.S.-Sino relations vis-a-vis Taiwan, made me realize the complexity of international relations, and caused me to change my view:
Even if China annexed Taiwan tomorrow, reunification would not spell disaster. As various Chinese officials have said, a reunified Taiwan would enjoy even greater autonomy than Hong Kong. In theory, Hong Kong is a Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China. In practice, Hong Kong retains its own legal system, currency and customs. A major international center of finance and trade, it is also an economic dynamo. For these reasons, Taiwan’s reunification would occur more in name than in substance. It would amount to new letterhead on a government memo, not serfdom.
Though he challenges this “one-country-two systems” view, Gerald Baker ends up bolstering it. Here’s the crux from his article in the current issue of the Weekly Standard:
The results from 10 years of Chinese control have been mixed. Hong Kong is distinctively freer than anywhere else in China. But it feels as though it is on a long leash. The basic civil rights China promised to maintain look robust enough. Freedom of religion is an obvious reality in the territory, attested to by the fact that the chief executive, or governor, Donald Tsang, is a devout Catholic who attends mass daily. The rule of law—essential to Hong Kong’s efficiently capitalist way of life—has also been maintained. The government has been successfully challenged in court on a number of matters by Hong Kong’s fiercely independent judiciary.
The right of assembly is also a practical reality. In June, on the anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre, hundreds of thousands of Hong Kong people gathered as they have every year for the last 18 years to denounce China’s human rights record.
More important, it was this type of direct democracy that produced perhaps the most significant political event in Hong Kong in the last five years. In 2003, with the former colony suffering heavily from the SARS crisis, and the government trying to create aggressive new security laws, a half million people marched through the streets to demand the right to vote and to protest a bumbling pro-Beijing administration. They forced not only the withdrawal of the legislation but also in the end the removal of the territory’s pro-Beijing chief executive.
For those of us too young to have lived through the heyday of Dr. Jack Kevorkian, Wesley Smith gives us a glimpse of the doctor’s ideas, through his own words. Meanwhile, the New York Timesopines that
he besmirched the movement he hoped to energize. If his antics provided anything of value, it was as a reminder of how much terminally ill patients can suffer and of the need for sane and humane laws allowing carefully regulated assisted suicides. . . .
The fundamental flaw in Dr. Kevorkian’s crusade was his cavalier, indeed reckless, approach. He was happy to hook up patients without long-term knowledge of their cases or any corroborating medical judgment that they were terminally ill or suffering beyond hope of relief with aggressive palliative care. . . .
By contrast, Oregon, which has the only law allowing terminally ill adults to request a lethal dose of drugs from a physician, requires two physicians to agree that the patient is of sound mind and has less than six months to live.
Related: Doctors shouldn’t medicate themselves and psychiatrist shouldn’t treat themselves. If they did, their patient would be a fool—which is exactly what Colin Ferguson, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Charles Manson and Jack Kevorkian were in choosing to represent themselves in their own capital criminal cases.
Mitt Romney’s various changes of heart demand a ready repository of finely tuned explanations. Rhetorically, if not factually, his answers are brilliant, employing what pollster Frank Luntz calls “words that work.” This does not necessarily mean answering the question, but reframing it onto common or comfortable territory. Some examples:
Q: You made . . . this decision on abortion, opposing abortion, relatively recently. Why should conservatives out there, people who oppose abortion believe you?
A: I’m not going to apologize for the fact that I became pro-life.
I proudly follow a long line of converts—George Herbert Walker Bush, Henry Hyde and Ronald Reagan, to name a few. I am evidence that your work, that your relentless campaign to promote the sanctity of human life, bears fruit.
Q: [T]here was a recent poll here in New Hampshire. Ten percent said they wouldn’t vote for you because you’re a Mormon. And last week we saw that picture of that man who refused to shake your hand because you are a Mormon. What would you like to say to the voters out there tonight about your faith, about yourself and about God?
A: Well, President Kennedy some time ago said he was not a Catholic running for president; he was an American running for president. And I’m happy to be a proud member of my faith. You know, I think it’s a fair question for people to ask, What do you believe? And I think if you want to understand what I believe, you could recognize that the values that I have are the same values you’ll find in faiths across this country. I believe in God, believe in the Bible, believe Jesus Christ is my savior. I believe that God created man in his image. I believe that the freedoms of man derive from inalienable rights that were given to us by God. And I also believe that there are some pundits out there that are hoping that I’ll distance myself from my church so that that’ll help me politically, and that’s not going to happen.
Addendum (6/25/2007): One glaring exception was Romney’s answer to the question, “Knowing everything you know right now, was it a mistake for us to invade Iraq?”
Well, I answered the question by saying it’s a—it’s a non sequitur, it’s a null set kind of question, because you can go back and say, if we knew then what we know now, by virtue of inspectors having been let in and giving us that information, by virtue of if Saddam Hussein had followed the U.N. resolutions, we wouldn’t be having this—this discussion. So it’s a hypothetical that I think is an unreasonable hypothetical. And the answer is, we did what we did; we did the right thing based on what we knew at that time. I think we made mistakes following the conduct—or the collapse of Saddam’s government.
Former Virginia Governor Jim Gilmore spoke to a small group of conservative journalists this morning at the office of Americans for Tax Reform. The hour-long session was part of the American Spectator Newsmaker Breakfast series. I’ll post a write-up later today; for now, let me report the governor’s response to my question.
I began, “You’ve said you’re the only true conservative,” at which point Gilmore cut me off, lifted his briefing papers from the table and slammed them back down.
“I have never said I’m the only true conservative,” Gilmore declared. He explained that the line came from a reporter, and has been recycled ad nauseam.
A few minutes with Google, however, indicates otherwise.
According to the Associated Press, in December, Gilmore said “he saw no true conservative in the GOP field.” That same month, he told the Washington Post, “There is no committed conservative in this race who can put together a national campaign.”
In February, Gilmore “told bloggers that he’s the only conservative in the race,” according to the host of that meeting, Rob Bluey of the Heritage Foundation. A few days later, at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, Gilmore repeated that “he is the only conservative in the race,” according to Kathryn Jean-Lopez, the editor of National Review Online.
In March, an article from the Virginian-Pilot noted, “Gilmore, 57, says he can win because he’s the only ‘real conservative’ seeking the GOP nomination in 2008.” In April, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported, “Claiming that he is the only true conservative in the race, Gilmore said, ‘I won’t waffle, waiver or change.’”
Gilmore then allowed me to continue my question, which I modified as follows: You say you’re the most “consistent” conservative. What specifically about your fellow second-tier candidates makes them inconsistent?
Again, Gilmore tried to disabuse me. “I don’t claim to be a better conservative” than the other candidates, he said.
A version of this blog post appeared in Politico on June 1, 2007.
Thirteen years ago, Anne Romney gave a $150 personal donation to Planned Parenthood. Upon the disclosure, her husband, who is now running for president on a staunchly pro-life platform, disclaimed, “Her positions are not terribly relevant to my campaign.”
But are they? Should you consider the views of a spouse when voting for his or her partner?
Undoubtedly, Bill Clinton isintegral to Hillary’s campaign. He is, hands down, the best Democratic mind and campaigner today. Of course, the Clintons are an exception, given that one of them occupied the Oval Office for eight years.
What does the Republican front-runner think? Asked if his wife would sit in on cabinet meetings, Rudy Giuliani told Barbara Walters, “If she wanted to. If they were relevant to something that she was interested in. I mean, that would be something that I’d be very, very comfortable with.”
To put the point poetically, recall the scene from Angels in America, where Al Pacino is bragging about his clout. Pacino tells his doctor, I pick up the phone, make a few calls, and you know who’s on the other end? “The president?” “Even better,” Pacino smirks. “His wife.”
Indeed, no one knows the president better than his wife. She’s the first one with him in the morning and the last one with him at night. Do this with someone long enough, and pillow talk is inevitable (even for Tony Soprano). “You know, honey,” Laura Bush admonished George W., “I think it’s time you let Don go” (I’m paraphrasing).
But W. rejected the advice (to fire his now-former former secretary of defense), and it’s worth noting that while the president’s wife, his mother and one of his closest advisers, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, are all pro-choice, he remains a committed pro-lifer; among other things, he has reinstated the global gag rule and appointed two, anti-choice judges to the Supreme Court.
As further evidence of spousal independence, consider such strange-bedfellow marriages as Mary Matalin and James Carville (she was a senior adviser to Dick Cheney, he to Bill Clinton) and Maria Shriver and Arnold Schwarzenegger (she’s a lifelong, hereditary Democrat, he’s the Republican governor of California).
Therefore, Romney is right: the views of a significant other aren’t terribly relevant. While it may be comforting to think that a wife is whispering NARAL talking points into her husband’s ear, the hope for a consequent change in policy is probably more hope than actuality. Spousal disagreement surely softens an otherwise inflexible position (hence the phrase “my better half”), and makes the other person aware of the counterarguments, but it’s unlikely to change one’s mind.
Addendum (6/27/08): Amy Sullivan points out additional examples of First Wife spousal disagreement:
From Pat Nixon, who declared “I believe abortion is a personal choice,” to Betty Ford, who praised the Supreme Court’s judgment in Roe as “a great, great decision” to Laura Bush, who on the eve of her husband’s inauguration said she did not think he would appoint justices who would overturn Roe, pro-choice wives have long tried to signal to voters that this particular Republican President would not focus on abortion.
Posted by Jonathan Rick in 
Before entering the digital space…
I flacked for the American Conservative Union and the Cato Institute, and reported for Time magazine and the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.