Edgewise

Let them eat Dean

After tripping over themselves a few times right out of the gate, the Clark campaign is starting to look downright professional. Here are a few of the top stories from the last couple of weeks:

• Kerry, Gephardt, and Lieberman attack Dean's electability.
• Dean strikes back.
• Clark testifies against the war criminal he bagged and gets praised by President Bill Clinton.
• Kerry, Gephardt, and Lieberman attack Dean's foreign policy experience.
• Dean strikes back, with vigor.
• Clark has a grandkid, raises oodles of money (nearly as much as Dean in the last quarter), and releases a new ad in which he gets a medal put round his neck by President Bill Clinton.

Not bad.

Sure, I'm leaving tons out, including the VP-or-not-VP demi-controversy between Dean and Clark. But that's pretty small stuff compared with the shots the other fellas have been taking.

It's hard not to be impressed by the disciplined way the Clark campaign has resisted joining the fray, yet still managed to raise tons of dough and grab their share of press. It's like they get to have Kerry, Gephardt, and Lieberman throw cake at Dean, and then, after Dean is covered in cake, the Clark campaign gets to eat that cake too.

Only less gross.

Safire: incoherent to the last

I really should resist responding to Bill Safire's op-eds in the Times, which lately have amounted to a form of trolling writ large. Also, I promised not to be all pro-Dean here at Edgewise. I have plenty of other outlets for that (Oakland for Dean, Tech4Dean, etc.). But Safire's latest piece, Don't Stop Dean is just so wrongheaded in so many ways I almost don't know where to begin. I suppose the place to begin is with what Safire himself describes as "convoluted reasoning":

There are now three de facto political parties in the U.S. In order of present strength, these are:

(1) The Republican Party, in control of all three branches of government and most of the statehouses, fat and sassy because the economy is rising and the war is being won.

Granted.

(2) The Dean-Internet Party, its Bush-despising base so energized as to be frenetic, its leader happy to be the apostle of anger, its bandwidth bandwagon gaining momentum with each pulse of its cursing cursor.

The "anger" canard, the pun on cursing ... but isn't it Kerry and Clark who've been showing their "anger" by cursing at the opposition? Safire won't let that fact get in the way of some clever wordplay.

(3) The Old Democratic Party, its base off base, its leadership fractured, its third-way ideology - vainly espoused by the Clintonian Democratic Leadership Council - a lost cause without a rebel voice.

Wait, I thought the DLC were the New Democrats?

Can it be that the opposition to the reigning Republicans is deeply cleft in twain, as mouth-fillingly described above? What evidence is there that the present noisy jousting is not just the usual primary-season scuffling?

Consider the "you're a liar" clash between the Old Democrat poll front-runner, Wesley Clark, and the emerging Dean party's hero.

Safire is so blinded by his Clinton obsessions that he doesn't recognize that the only viable alternative to Dean in the race right now is also an Internet-driven phenomenon, complete with fundraising keyed off of attacks and an open-source middleware software development arm. He's also hitting Bush on the war. The only real distinction between the Dean and Clark positions and their supporters is the "we need a general to beat a sitting commander-in-chief" argument.

Clark claims that Dean offered him the vice presidential nomination: "It was dangled out there . . . offered as much as it could have been." Dean denies it flatly: "I did not and have not offered anyone the vice presidency." Clark, egged on by his Clinton handlers, imputes a dishonorable motive to Dean: "Why is he squirming? Because maybe he's done the same for a lot of other people."

As a partisan, I wish they weren't tussling over this and I hope it doesn't mean they can't be friends once the voting is done, but I also remember the Dean camp attempting to deflate Clark by suggesting he'd make a good veep and with all the parsing of words going on, I have little doubt that we're looking at two different spins on the same set of facts. Hardly the equivalent of push-polls in South Carolina attacking McCain as if he had Strom Thurmond's skeletons in his closet.

Skipping the DLC-related insider baseball, we get to this:

What if Dean, as the pollwagon now suggests, trounces the Clinton Establishment - Clark, Lieberman, Kerry, even Edwards and Sharpton - in the primaries? Will they loyally kiss the ring of the winner?

You bet your fat ass they will, Bill. They all want to unseat Bush. Only in your fantasies are there Democrats who like 2008 better than 2004 for retaking the White House.

Of course they will. They'll rally round to hold the Democratic Party together even as it is taken over by the Dean-Internet set. They'll pay lip service and lose respectably, eyeing a comeback and takeover in '08.

If only Republicans were capable of losing respectably....

But what if Dean loses momentum in Iowa, does "less than expected" in New Hampshire, gets clobbered in Carolina or blows his cool at media tormentors once too often? What if the Old Democrat center, revivified as a stop-Dean movement and helped by the pendulum press, actually stops Dean? Could happen. Then what?

Of course it could happen. Any Democrat who can beat Dean now would be a formidable candidate in the general election.

He is not the sort who gives up easily. Nor is he likely to ask Clark or whomever in a smoke-free room for the No. 2 slot. Dean has grass-roots troops, a unique fund-raising organization, the name recognition and the fire-in-the-belly, messianic urge to go all the way on his own ticket.

This last part is a lie at worst, a projection at best. This is the latest right-wing fantasy (at least until they start slavering over a Hillary write-in again): the idea that Dean will run as a third-party candidate. Not only has Dean said he will endorse the party's nominee, but it's clear to anyone paying attention that Dean's campaign is about rebuilding and reinvigorating the Democratic party from the grassroots up, not about creating a new Whig party.

Sure, some true believers may refuse to knock on doors for Gephardt or Clark, but more of us Deanies will dedicate our people-to-people network to the unified project of kicking out the rascals, and there's a good chance that this network will persist after the election, regardless of who wins (contrast that with the evaporating Rainbow Coalition from 1988).

Politronic chatter picked up by pundits monitoring lefty blogsites and al-Gora intercepts flashes the warning: If stopped, Dean may well bolt.

I'm starting to realize that Safire bathes his bullshit in cuteness. Naturally, the lefty blogs I read suggest nothing of the kind, but then Safire can always say he's just fantasizing, with his al-Gora joke (which is pretty offensive). He's having it both ways, floating his trial balloons. It's actually been fairly amusing watching Brooks and Safire hammer away at Dean from any angle they can imagine.

That split of opposition would be a bonanza for Bush. In a two-man race, the odds are that he would beat Dean comfortably, but in a three-party race, Bush would surely waltz in with the greatest of ease.

No duh. Even the first part is reasonable. Dean himself has pointed out that Bush, not he, is the frontrunner in this race.

Here's my problem: Such a lopsided, hubris-inducing result would be bad for Bush, bad for the G.O.P., bad for the country. Landslides lead to tyrannous majorities and big trouble.

This is the most laughable part of the column for two reasons. First of all, it's the cheapest sort of reverse, reverse, reverse psychology. Naturally Safire would love a Republican landslide, even though yes he would fear that his libertarian pet projects would be swamped in such an event. More importantly, though, the narrow, razor-thin, dragged-over-the-finish-line result from 2000 was already bad for the country. It turns out that it doesn't take a landslide to yield tyrannous majorities and big trouble after all. It just takes hubris.

You with your deep-furrowed brow

1. Saddam is captured.
2. There's much rejoicing. Yay! Yay!
3. Then less then 10 days later we go to Orange Alert -- "high risk of terrorist attacks." Yikes.

They're planning something even bigger than 9/11, we're told. And Osama OKd this attack personally. All while Saddam sits in a small room somewhere, after spending the better part part of the last 9 months on the run.

Which might make you think:
- "Hey -- maybe the guy we captured isn't necessarily the guy who's out there actively trying to kill us."
- And "perhaps Dean isn't entirely off-the-ball when he says that Saddam's capture doesn't make the US appreciably safer."
- And "could be that Clark has a point when he argues that attacking other nations won't make the US safer, our focus needs to be on attacking terrorist organizations."

At least, that's what it makes me think.

That and [insert soon-to-be-neologed-word for the thumping background stress caused by Orange Alert here].

Iraq may be a safer place with Saddam in prison. The Middle East may be a safer place with Saddam in prison. The world may even be a safer place overall with Saddam in prison...

(though like a lot of folks, I would argue that all three would be much safer if we'd opted to move multilaterally, but fine. Whatever. We could debate this issue for years, you with your deep-furrowed brow and your mule-like proposensity to eat hay, me with my gigantic forehead and bulbous, unblinking left eye. So let's just drop it and move on, OK? OK?! Thanks.)

...but America? Safer now? Safer this week? With administration officials suddenly chiming the Big Bell in Town Square in fear of what might be right around the corner?

Safer than what?

Dean/Bradley?

Interesting multi-page interview with Dean up on ABCnews.com, including a suggestion by the interviewer that Bradley might be a VP consideration. No real response from Dean of course, but that's the first I've heard of a Dean/Bradley pairing, even as a hint of a whisper of 2/3 a piece of gossip. I hadn't even considered that option before, but it does make some kind of sense....

Attribution funnies

Adam Nagourney at The Times seems to be having some fun at Kerry's press secretary's expense:

Mr. Kerry's press secretary, Stephanie Cutter, sent an e-mail message to news organizations listing remarks Dr. Dean had made over the past six months that she said demonstrated that his opposition to the war was "politically driven." But Ms. Cutter, reflecting the concern among the campaigns that they not be viewed as turning a foreign policy victory to political advantage, put a note on the top of the statement demanding that it be reported as "background" and attributed only to a Democratic campaign.

Reason #12 I'm glad I'm not Saddam Hussein's bladder

There's a fascinating insta-article from Time covering Saddam's first day as a prisoner. (Mad props to the always excellent Talking Points Memo for the link that sent me there in the first place.)

The whole article is worth a quick look if only to be amazed, as I was, to see that Time already has a "We Got Him" cover up on the site. But here's the highlight:

When asked "How are you?" ... Saddam responded, "I am sad because my people are in bondage." When offered a glass of water by his interrogators, Saddam replied, "If I drink water I will have to go to the bathroom and how can I use the bathroom when my people are in bondage?"

A little bit later, an unnamed US intelligence official sums it up nicely:

"We can now determine," he said, "if [Saddam] is the mastermind of everything or not." The official elaborated: "Have we actually cut the head of the snake or is he just an idiot hiding in a hole?"

Toughening up Dean

My instincts about Dean's chances are just about the opposite of Andrew Northrup's, but he makes a pretty good point in More Unseemly Politicization of the Political Processes when he suggests that Dean sure had better be able to handle attacks like these from Democrats if he's going to fight off a scorched-earth media campaign from Team Bush.

Interesting Saddam theory from the Whiskey Bar

Billmon has produced another masterful analysis of the capture of Saddam.

This comment in the attached thread caught my eye:

am I the only one who smells a rat? Here was an operation involving 600 soldiers going after a tip on saddam hussein, and NOT A SHOT WAS FIRED???THat tells me they knew that not a shot would be fired at them.Saddam was found disoriented in a hole in the ground with a gun and a couple of local goons, not his own men.I think this was a hand-off. Someone has had him on ice for a couple weeks, he got too hot, so they sold him to the US for concessions to be paid at a later date. Some war-lord turned him over to the US.

The Republicans' New England problem

There's a lot of talk lately about the Democrats' Southern problem -- how Bush swept the South last time around, how the Democrats can't win without the South, and how the South is sure to find any of the Democratic candidates repellent.

Why all this concern for the Democrats from big-hearted conservatives like Trent Lott and Zell "all I want for Christmas is my own show on Fox" Miller?

It doesn't seem fair. Conservatives deserve compassion too. Why isn't anyone worried about the Republicans' New England problem? Their problem out West? Their problems in just about every major city?

I mean, it's not like Bush crushed Gore in 2000. The electoral contest came down to one state -- one incredibly close state. So putting aside the bottom-line issue of how the war and economy will be doing come election day, it just stands to reason that the electoral map starts out split pretty equally between the parties. They each have their strongholds. They each have their weaknesses.

But no one cares about Bush's problems. Noooo, all anyone wants to talk about nowadays are the Democratic Party's problems. Just another example of liberal bias in the media.

Or something like that.

Game not over...

Here's a sideways counter-point to Xian's earlier post:

The newsmedia has a vested interest in keeping these things entertaining. That's not conspiracy-talk. It's just capitalism. Year in, year out, the one constant is, there's always a tussle -- a moment of drama. No drama from the Republicans this year, so you can bank on some Dem drama before we're through -- one of the other candidates will get a shot, just like McCain, Bradley, and Ted Kennedy did, or even, briefly, Jerry Brown and Pat Buchanan.

It's just a question of which of the other candidates will get tagged annointed as the challenger, and when. For Dean, clearly, the later, the better. Besides his grassroots support and his financial strength, his best defense right now is this overloaded field. The longer his opposition stays finely divided, the weaker the challenger will be when they finally get their moment.

Right now, we're in expectation-setting mode. The higher the expectations set for Dean, the easier it will be to sell the story that some other candidate has exceeded expectations and become a credible underdog alternative. Someone will do much better than expected in New Hampshire or South Carolina. And from there, ya never know. After all, when Bill Clinton reignited his campaign in New Hampshire, and dubbed himself "the comeback kid," he did it with an expectations-shattering second-place finish.

Quayle's brain likes Dean's chances

Like Brooks used to be, Kristol is one of those Republican (yes, neoconservative) pundits who isn't afraid to go against the talking points. He seems to get a bye somehow, maybe as a kind of jester or cassandra.

His column in the WashPost today, How Dean Could Win, cuts through the fog of the otherwise unbroken drumbeat from most op ed columnists: Dean is crazy (Krauthammer), an angry liar (Brooks), unelectable (Kristof, et al.), the candidate Bush most wants to run against (Rove, ibid.).

As a Dean supporter, I would prefer it if the Republicans continue misunderestimating him as long as possible. As a campaign volunteer, I don't think I can fully convey the sense of energy and enthusiasm and joy animating the "early adopters," so I won't.

Game over?

The latest rumor is that Gore is about to endorse Dean.

If true, that looks to me like a massive signal to fall into line to the rest of the faithful. The dirty little secret of this campaign is that if any of the nine candidates were to gain the nomination the Democratic voter base would have supported that candidate, from Sharpton to Lieberman. That's how badly we want to win this time.

There's a lot of smug condescension coming from the right right now about the Democrats making a mistake by going for Dean, but I think they are overlooking a new alliance determined to rollback this fringe element that has control of the Republican party and our government. governing class.

It's the constituents of this loose alliance that worry me more. Only if the Democrats fail to unite, if the pillars of the party withold support from their nominee in order to prove right all the self-fulfilling prophecies of doom, gloom, and conventional-wisdom cocktail party handicapping, only if that happens do the Dems have no chance of winning.

Now, just think how people will react when Clinton is out there stumping for Dean (or, Clark, or whomever)?

The Senator from Potty-Mouth

Turns out, the "F." in John F. Kerry doesn't stand for "friggin." If you know what I mean. And in case you don't, let me spell it out for ya: John Kerry is a big-time potty-mouth -- big-time.

This story must make the Kerry folks so happy -- after all these months of hearing about how their guy is a patrician stiff. And now Andrew Card throws them this perfect lob. Stiff? He's no stiff! He's a hard-cussing, leather-chewing, potty-mouthed son of a you-know-what-and-don't-make-me-say-it.

Well good for them, sez I. And to all a good night.

It's beginning to look a lot like Grozny

I honestly have no idea of the veracity of this dissenting report about what happened in Samarra. In fact, while it circulates the idea that Iraqi police may have tipped off the insurgents/bandits who attacked the currency convoy, I seem to recall that Times reporter Dexter Filkins mentioned on the Lehrer hour last night that this currency delivery (to a local bank?) was scheduled exactly one month after the previous delivery, which had also been attacked.

It's no proof of an inside job if ambushers simply assumed that there'd be another beginning-of-the-month delivery. For that matter, why couldn't they lie in wait a few days if the schedule were more irregular?

The real dispute is between the Army spokesman's assertion that returning fire was disciplined and adhered to rules of engagement that aim to minimize civilian casualties and the locals who claim that the American soldiers responded indiscriminately, spreading mayhem and killing more locals than insurgents.

Naturally, I have no way of knowing the truth. I was inclined to believe the adamant declarations of the coalition spokesman. The account linked above describes a response that may have crossed the line, or - worse yet, really - may have been well within guidelines but nonetheless rained destruction on bystanders.

Consider this extended quotation from the article, A Combat Leader Gives the Inside Skinny on the Biggest Battle since the War Ended, archived at Soliders for the Truth (an organization I've never heard of before):

Since we [are] armored troops and we are not trained to use counter-insurgency tactics; the logic is to respond to attacks using our superior firepower to kill the rebel insurgents. This is done in many cases knowing that there are people inside these buildings or cars who may not be connected to the insurgents.

The belief in superior firepower as a counter-insurgency tactic is then extended down to the average Iraqi, with the hope that the Iraqis will not support the guerillas and turn them in to coalition forces, knowing we will blow the hell out of their homes or towns if they don't. Of course in too many cases, if the insurgents bait us and goad us into leveling buildings and homes, the people inside will then hate us (even if they did not before) and we have created more recruits for the guerillas.

The Commander of the 3rd Brigade Combat Team, Colonel Frederick Rudesheim, said after this battle that "We are going to continue to take the fight to this enemy. This is the most significant contact we have had to date in the city of Samarra. We are going to have to respond accordingly."

This is a great attitude for a combat commander to have when fighting an armored force on force, but Colonel Rudesheim is not trained in Counter-Insurgency and my soldiers are taking the heat. We drive around in convoys, blast the hell out of the area, break down doors and search buildings; but the guerillas continue to attacks us. It does not take a George Patton to see we are using the wrong tactics against these people. We cannot realistically expect that Stability and Support Operations will defeat this insurgency.

As one would expect from using our overwhelming firepower, much of Samarra is fairly well shot up. The tanks and brads rolled over parked cars and fired up buildings where we believed the enemy was. This must be expected considering the field of vision is limited in an armored vehicle and while the crews are protected, they also will use recon by fire to suppress the enemy. Not all the people in this town were hostile, but we did see many people firing from rooftops or alleys that looked like average civilians, not the Fedayeen reported in the press. I even saw Iraqi people throwing stones at us, I told my soldiers to hold their fire unless they could indentify a real weapon, but I still can't understand why somebody would throw a stone at a tank, in the middle of a firefight.

Since we did not stick around to find out, I am very concerned in the coming days we will find we killed many civilians as well as Iraqi irregular fighters. I would feel great if all the people we killed were all enemy guerrillas, but I can't say that. We are probably turning many Iraqi against us and I am afraid instead of climbing out of the hole, we are digging ourselves in deeper.

What this all reminds me of is the Russians in Chechnya. When we took Baghdad so quickly and easily, the Russians were reportedly furious that they're own siege of Grozny, followed by building-to-building streetfighting was such a bloodbath in comparison.

However, we now seem to be stuck fighting guerillas with this overwhelming firepower, and it's hard to see how the citizens in the middle aren't going to be savaged by it all. Morally, it is reprehensible that insurgents would attack from inhabited positions and hide among civilians. It is a familair terror tactic, and it is abhorrent. Nonetheless, the moral nuances tend to be lost on people who see an occupying force wreaking havoc in their midst.

Shameless

When I saw the Thanksgiving news about the President going to Iraq to cheer the troops, I thought this was admirable, something definitely worth doing. I didn't grudge Bush the good PR. I felt something similar when the statue of Saddam was pulled down (in Firdos Square, was it?), and only later, as stories of a contrived crowd of Chalabi's exiles made up the cheering supporters in that photo shoot, did I begin to feel gamed, like a dupe.

In a similar way, the good feeling about Bush's holiday gesture is wearing off, when you hear that the charming story about the plane being spotted, like Santa, by a British Airways pilot now appears to be false. Couple that with merchandise (pins or keychains), ready to go, reading "Did I just see Air Force One?" and the stink of political hackery becomes unavoidable.

Why am I proved wrong every time I give this administration the benefit of the doubt?