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Wednesday, September 4
In the American Lawyer, wherein Stanford law
professor Michele Landis Dauber eviscerates the conservative notion that the 9th Circuit -- generally considered more liberal than other circuits, as the 4th Circuit is more conservative -- has lost touch with judicial precedent and grown too large to be wieldy. It's brilliant. [posted 9:00 am]
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Tuesday, September 3
BUSH FOR DEMS IN '02? Liberal bloggers have been dismissing Richard Berke's
Sunday New York Times piece on why Republicans losing the House could be good for George W. Bush's re-election prospects.
But we think Berke's got a point. Several conservative bloggers have made the following argument, one with which we agree: Having unified government can be a mixed blessing, especially when, as is the case for the current GOP, the congressional wing of the party is far to one extreme end (in this case the right) of public opinion. When you're president -- especially in a period of ideological parity -- you can't afford to be pulled very far to either extreme. Even if you are a conservative (or liberal) you've got to work hard to hide it.
If the GOP kept the House and won the Senate, it might be good for conservatives -- who would have complete control of the agenda in Washington -- but it would be bad for Bush, as he would have no leverage over Tom DeLay, Grover Norquist and the rest. He would have little choice but to accede to a whole host of right-wing policy demands, including on issues like abortion where a kind of wishy-washy anti-choicism is the best course a president in Bush's position can hope for. He might be forced to nominate an extremely conservative, anti-choice justice to the Supreme Court, for instance -- creating a fight over issues he'd rather not talk about openly. And even worse, unless the GOP won a working majority in the Senate (about 55 votes), he would have the expectations accompanying a unified government without a real ability to move legislation through the Senate. Smart Republicans remember the lesson of Bill Clinton's first two years in office -- the worst years of his presidency, despite his party's control of Congress.
Tapped ranks the optimal fall electoral outcomes for Bush as follows:
2. Republicans lose the House but win the Senate.
This spreads responsibility for legislative logjams. It also puts liberal Democrats in charge of the key House committees. This would give the Democrats a chance to "Dinglegram" -- i.e. subpoena the hell out of -- the Bush Administration, but it would also give Bush something to triangulate against. (As the Gingrich Republicans did for Clinton.) Meanwhile, control of the Senate allows the GOP to bottle up any remotely important Democratic legislation, stripping the Democrats of the ability to land dangerous legislation on Bush's desk (i.e. a generous prescription drug benefit.) And the GOP still gets to pack the courts, which could keep the conservative base in line and provide a substantial and long-lasting victory for the right.
3. Republicans keep the House, Democrats keep the
Senate. This arrangement hasn't been so bad for the White House. With the exception of Judiciary, which is chaired by Patrick Leahy, the most important committees -- Finance, Appropriations and Budget -- are chaired by milquetoast moderates from Red states: Max Baucus of Montana, Robert Byrd of West Virginia and Kent Conrad of North Dakota, respectively. Democratic control of the Senate has kept the GOP from stacking the courts, but the Democrats have racked up only two major substantive victories against Bush: accounting reform and campaign finance reform. They're not yet effective enough to cause Bush major problems. The worst that can happen to Bush --
and the best that can happen for the Dems -- is a stalemate.
4. Republicans win the House and Senate, but with a
razor-thin majority in both. The right would get its judges, which is important, but conservatives would be held soley responsible for the public's inevitable dissatisfaction with the GOP's unwillingness to address precription drugs and other issues.
5. Republicans lose the House, Democrats keep the
Senate. This would be mostly bad for Bush (Democratic control of legislative agenda, ability to land embarassing bills on Bush's desk) and somewhat good (the Dems are unlikely to achieve a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, and they share responsibility for the legislative process). But the bigger the margin Democrats have in the Senate, the worse it is for Bush. Naturally, this doesn't mean Bush will stop campaigning for the House GOP. To do so would be neither practical nor politically possible. But that doesn't mean it might not be the best thing to do. [posted 5:00 pm] FROM OUR LATEST ISSUE. We've just posted three articles from our most recent edition: a William Galston piece on the perils of attacking Iraq, an article by Stanley Hoffman on the Bush Administration's dangerous disregard for the opinions of our allies and Harold Meyerson's take on the re-election bid of Paul Wellstone in Minnesota. Plus, Robert Kuttner's online column this week focuses on the mess that telephone deregulation has created. [posted 3:20 pm] ANN COULTER, FIRED OR "CENSORED"? The Centre Daily, the newspaper of
State College, Pennsylvania (the home of Penn State), has fired Coulter.
Why? Well, editorial judgment. The question is whether conservatives will whine that she has been censored. [posted 3:10 pm] DID HOWARD FINEMAN JOIN TIME? Nope, that's just Michael Duffy doing his best Fineman impression. [posted 1:30 pm] UPDATE AND MEA CULPA. Time magazine reports that Powell has already decided to leave after Bush's term ends. But is that soon enough?
And some people around the office have pointed out that there's another black member of Bush's cabinet -- Rod Paige, the secretary of education. Our explanation: Rod Paige might as well be the education secretary of Guatemela for all the influence and visibility he has in the Bush Administration. But yes, technically, we were wrong. [posted 1:20 pm] FROM SUNDAY'S POST. We read this smart, persuasive Julian Bond column in
The Washington Post on the web, since it came out Sunday and we were on vacation like everybody else. That's too bad, because every voter in Washington, D.C., should read it and ponder. Here's the money bit:
He wears bow ties. How "black" is bow-tied Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan?
He received an Ivy League education. What should we make of Paul Robeson, Columbia, 1923? Or W.E.B. DuBois, Harvard, cum laude, 1890?
He speaks in grammatically proper sentences. What does that say about articulate Malcolm X?
He plays tennis. What about Arthur Ashe and Althea Gibson, not to mention the Williams sisters?
He wasn't a warrior in the '60s civil rights movement. Are those of his generation condemned to political irrelevancy because they were born too late?
He's a nonnative carpetbagger. What does that say about
Mississippi-born and Memphis-raised Marion Barry, who had lived in Washington six years when he first ran for office?1. Republicans win the House and the Senate with a large majority in the latter, which is highly unlikely. This is the sweep. The GOP could remake much of Washington in those two years. But it won't happen.
That's why the next best thing is . . .
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Take Washington's Mayor Anthony Williams, now facing reelection. Williams has been accused of not being "black enough" because:
We couldn't have said it better ourselves. Bravo. [posted 12:45 pm]
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BILL KRISTOL'S SECRET PLAN TO TOPPLE GEORGE W. BUSH. This sounds farfetched, but please -- bear with us, folks. Now, for some time, Bill Kristol, through his perch at The Weekly Standard, has been waging a one-man war of words against Colin Powell, George W. Bush's secretary of state and probably the most popular and respected man in this country. (Actually, it's not quite a one-man war, because The New Republic's Lawrence Kaplan, another neocon hawk, until recently was writing a lot of anti-Powell articles. Sometimes it seemed like that's all Kaplan wrote. But Kaplan's been MIA lately.) During the past year or so, Kristol has written literally dozens of editorials assailing Powell for not backing the Bush Administration's hawks on various questions concerning Afghanistan, Iraq and the Middle East. (Here's the latest.) On several occasions he's obliquely questioned Powell's loyalty to the White House. And he's even attacked Powell, directly and indirectly, for leaking information damaging to the hawks' causes -- which is incredibly hypocritical, considering that half the time Kristol has been practically taking dictation from Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz.
Anyway, Kristol would seem -- on the surface -- to oppose Powell for the most principled reasons. Tempermentally, Powell is a moderate on foreign policy; Kristol and his pals are aggressively hawkish. Powell believes in diplomacy; Kristol and company seem to believe diplomacy is naive and foolish. Powell prefers to negotiate with Yasser Arafat; Kristol and the gang would rather see him hung. Powell is also far from conservative on non-foreign-policy issues like affirmative action and abortion rights. So it would make sense for Perle, Wolfowitz and journalistic proxies like Kristol to hound Powell mercilessly. Tapped imagines that, on the whole, Powell finds it deeply annoying to have his name trashed by these guys. After all, this is a man for whom becoming president would have been nearly as easy as simply declaring his candidacy. He must wonder: "I could have been president. But when Dubya calls and asks me to become Secretary of State, I do my duty and join up. And he can't keep these chickenshits in line?"
But wait! Kristol is also Washington's biggest booster of . . . John McCain, Bush's only serious rival in the Republican Party and the embodiment of Kristol's "national greatness conservatism." So maybe, just maybe, Kristol's plan is as follows: Get Powell so steamed that he quits. When Bush loses the most visible moderate -- and only African American -- in his cabinet, he'll endure weeks or months of bad press. The establishment press will pen solemn editorials mourning the loss of a great statesman. Jonathan Alter will write a long cover story in Newsweek depicting Powell's departure as a synecdoche for the Bush Administration's abandonment of the credible center. Moderate and swing voters will begin to wonder what Powell knows that they don't. Bush's poll numbers will start to slide. All of a sudden, the idea of a Republican challenging George Bush in 2004 won't seem so far-fetched, re-opening the door for . . . John McCain.
P.S. Responsible opposing viewpoints may disagree. [posted 12:10 pm]
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WAIT A SECOND . . . Blogger and New York Times antagonist Mickey Kaus may be at war with himself. On the one hand, he believes the Times to be shaped down to the last comma (well, almost) by top editor Howell Raines. On the other, he points out that stories written on the same issue but by different Times reporters sometimes disagree with each other. Doesn't one argument obviate the other? That is, if Raines really were a controlling micromanager dedicated to transforming the Times into an organ of the center-left, would he really be so careless as to allow Leslie Kaufman to contradict the putatively anti-welfare-reform reporting of Nina Bernstein? (Click here and search for "Bernstein" to see Kaus's post on this.) Isn't the existence of multiple reportorial angles on a single topic evidence that Raines prefers to allow a healthy intellectual diversity to flourish at the Times?
P.S. Kaus cites Jake Tapper's New York Times Magazine interview with Dick Armey as evidence that Republicans only get good treatment from the press when they dissent from the GOP line. Kaus may have read it online, but the interview doesn't exactly make Armey look good. The print layout billboards an Armey quote in which the congressman confuses the war in Afghanistan with the Vietnam War.
P.P.S. Also, the phenomenon is not limited to Republicans. Think Joe Lieberman or John Kerrey.
P.P.P.S. Also also, Kaus is way ahead of us! [posted 10:50 am]
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