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The Weblog at The View from the Core - Friday, November 12, 2004
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Congrats to Lex Communis Peter Sean Bradley gets an Instanod. Lane Core Jr. CIW P Fri. 11/12/04 09:33:11 PM |
3-D Red-Blue The most revealing map yet.
(Thanks, Esquire.) Lane Core Jr. CIW P Fri. 11/12/04 09:28:00 PM |
State Presidential Vote Breakout 2000-2004 Courtesy of RealClear Politics. I have highlighted all the items in the "Change for Bush" column that are negative. (Thanks, Peter.) Lane Core Jr. CIW P Fri. 11/12/04 09:01:52 PM |
Hindsight Is 20/80 Arianna Huffington writes at AlterNet, today: Twelve days before the election, James Carville stood in a Beverly Hills living room surrounded by two generations of Hollywood stars. After being introduced by Sen. John Kerry's daughter, Alexandra, he told the room — confidently, almost cockily — that the election was in the bag. "If we can't win this damn election," the advisor to the Kerry campaign said, "with a Democratic Party more unified than ever before, with us having raised as much money as the Republicans, with 55 percent of the country believing we're heading in the wrong direction, with our candidate having won all three debates, and with our side being more passionate about the outcome than theirs — if we can't win this one, then we can't win sh*t! And we need to completely rethink the Democratic Party." Well, as it turns out, that's exactly what should be done. But instead, Carville and his fellow architects of the Democratic defeat have spent the last week defending their campaign strategy, culminating on Monday morning with a breakfast for an elite core of Washington reporters.... And Ryan Lizza writes at TNR, posted yesterday (brackets in original): Last Saturday night at H2O, a waterfront nightclub in southwest Washington, the Kerry campaign assembled for a final evening of drinking. To everyone's surprise, John Kerry himself flew down from Boston to attend the festivities. Trying to buck up his demoralized troops, the ex-candidate gave a short speech about how much his team had accomplished. "People are going to try to rewrite history and say we didn't have a message in this campaign," Kerry told his staff, according to one Democratic strategist. "And, let me tell you, the message never changed. The message we had in the final days of the campaign was the same as the one we had in the primaries." That was news to some of the boozy Kerry revelers. "Everyone in that room was on edge because everyone wanted to know: What was that message?" says the strategist. It's that time again for Democrats. Kerry aides and party strategists have thrown themselves into their quadrennial post-campaign ritual of recriminations. Old scabs are being picked. Scores are being settled. Clintonites point fingers at the Kennedy wing. Longtime Kerry aides throw accusations of disloyalty at the Clintonites. Staffers from the Democratic National Committee lob bombs at staffers from the campaign. Policy wonks gripe about inept political consultants. Kerry aides who traveled on the campaign plane snipe at the aides who were based in Washington. Democrats, out of power and out of jobs, are doing what they do best: turning on one another. The largest caucus of recriminators, one that spans ideological boundaries and includes critics from every corner of the party, argues that Kerry failed to offer a compelling message. As Kerry seemed to realize in his speech Saturday night, the no-message critique is congealing into conventional wisdom. I heard it in every conceivable permutation from almost everyone I interviewed. "I don't know that we ever knew what it was we were saying about George W. Bush," says one senior member of the team, whose job it was to come up with a message about Bush. It was a problem that plagued the campaign as soon as they stumbled, penniless, from the primaries into the general election. "When we got into the general, nobody knew how to go against Bush," says a senior campaign official. "[Senior adviser Bob] Shrum and [pollster Mark] Mellman built this strategy against Bush, 'Stronger at home, respected in the world.' What does that mean? We never even had strategy memos." By the fall, things were no better. "If there was a clear message in September about why you elect Kerry and defeat Bush, most of the people in the campaign were unaware of it," says one senior strategist hired late in the campaign.... (Thanks, James.) For an indicator of just how bad a candidate John Forbes Kerry was, see this for a reminder (or, if you haven't seen it before, a clue) about how much top-flight insider help he got from comrades in mainstream media from the start and still managed to screw things up, day by day, week by week, month by month. As I wrote back in July, before the DNC convention: .... Yes, I think Kedwards is already past the Point of No Return: the nation greeted the new Kerry-Edwards team — last week? the week before? who knows? who cares? — with a gigantic yawn. Even the Democratic Establishment — professional politicians & mainstream media — can hardly hide that they are pretending to be excited, if they are even bothering to pretend. It's all over but the shouting. Of which there will probably be a lot next week. After that, a long, slow slide into home plate, where the umpire will whip his arm into the air, his thumb pointing back over his shoulder. By then, even the runner will know he's been out by a mile. Surely, you didn't think that I didn't know what I was talking about did you? ;-) Lane Core Jr. CIW P Fri. 11/12/04 07:23:34 PM |
Happy Third Blogiversary To Matthew Hoy @ Hoystory.com. Lane Core Jr. CIW P Fri. 11/12/04 05:43:27 PM |
The Specter of Specter Thomas Sowell writes at TownHall about the senior senator from my state. From Tuesday, Nov. 9: .... Senator Specter is also one of those people who is often wrong but never in doubt. He has mangled the meaning of such basic concepts as "judicial activism" and "original intent." It would be a tragedy for him to become chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, where he could mangle nominees and in the process mangle the Constitution of the United States. From Wednesday, Nov. 10: .... The South Dakota voters' defeat of Senator Tom Daschle, leader of the obstructionists who refused to let some of President Bush's judicial nominees come up for a vote in the Senate, seemed to offer some hope that such obstructionism might subside. But Senator Specter's words suggest that the mantle of obstructionism may simply have been passed on from Daschle to Specter. If Senate Republicans follow seniority and make Senator Specter chairman of the Senate Judiciary, then we could be in for the dangerous business of litmus tests for judicial nominees and the trashing of nominees who believe in following the original intent of laws, rather than engaging in judicial activism.... From yesterday, Nov. 11: .... To President Bush's credit, he has tried to stop the steady drift toward arbitrary judicial rule by nominating people like California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown who have a track record of opposing judicial activism. A President who is trying to make a fundamental change in the federal judiciary and a chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee who wants to continue the "mainstream" trends are in a fundamental contradiction, no matter how much each side tries to paper over the difference with nice words. With so many federal court vacancies, and with several Supreme Court vacancies almost certain to occur during the next four years, this may be the last chance in our lifetime to reverse the trend toward government by unelected judges.... Specter is trying to sow confusion about what he said the day after the election; recall that I blogged a transcript for your inspection. Here, for example, is a clear & indisputable admission, from the mouth of Arlen Specter himself, that he "expects" that judicial nominees would be acceptable to the Democrats who have been filibustering to keep the Senate from confirming nominees: .... We start off with the basic fact that the Democrats are have filibustered and expect them to filibuster if the nominees are not within the broad range of acceptability. I think there is a very broad range of Presidential Discretion but there is a range.... I don't want to prejudge what the President is going to do. But the President is well aware of what happened when a number of his nominees were sent up, were filibustered, and the President has said he is not going to impose a litmus test, he faced that issue squarely in the third debate and I would not expect the President, I would expect the President to be mindful of the considerations that I mentioned.... Lane Core Jr. CIW P Fri. 11/12/04 08:05:04 AM |
"Swift Justice" A poem by Russ Vaughn. I'm late in blogging the latest from our favorite Screaming Eagle Poet. Swift Justice
Bold John sailed forth in his faux scow,
Russ Vaughn See also these. Lane Core Jr. CIW P Fri. 11/12/04 07:39:09 AM |
Ponnuru on Specter & Hewitt FWIW, I think Ramesh has the better of the argument. Lane Core Jr. CIW P Fri. 11/12/04 07:17:23 AM |
Pajama Hadin (Thanks, Big Trunk.) Lane Core Jr. CIW P Fri. 11/12/04 07:07:28 AM |
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