Sunday, January 25, 2004

Schwartz Mail Report

So far, our special mailbox for Julius Schwartz has received 188 "Get Well" wishes, six requests to help someone in Nigeria get money out of the country, seven messages telling him he's won a lottery in Holland and thirteen offers to sell him Viagra and/or enlarge his penis. I'm trying to decide which ones to include in the package.

• Posted at 9:33 PM · LINK

Recommended Reading

Andrew Sullivan attacks Bush's domestic agenda. What's interesting but only mentioned briefly in this piece is that Sullivan is a (generally) conservative pundit who has been a huge supporter of Bush's foreign agenda. He even swoons over the macho posturing. I link to this article not because I agree with most of it (though I do) but because I think it's significant that Bush has aroused such contradictory feelings in some conservatives.

• Posted at 3:46 PM · LINK

Quotes

Here's another one of those cases where the headline may not quite match the content of the story...

Howard Dean Says Iraqis Worse Off Now
By NEDRA PICKLER, Associated Press Writer

MANCHESTER, N.H. - Democratic presidential hopeful Howard Dean said Sunday that the standard of living for Iraqis is a "whole lot worse" since Saddam Hussein's removal from power in last year's American-led invasion.

"You can say that it's great that Saddam is gone and I'm sure that a lot of Iraqis feel it is great that Saddam is gone," said the former Vermont governor, an unflinching critic of the war against Iraq. "But a lot of them gave their lives. And their living standard is a whole lot worse now than it was before."

If you punctuate the quote that way, it's at least a little arguable that the last part refers to all Iraqis. But I suspect Dean meant that the Iraqis whose standard of living is a whole lot worse now are the dead ones. The "whole lot worse" part is the key that there's a little sarcasm intended and the structure of the sentence suggests that what he's saying is that you have to weigh the sentiments of some live Iraqis against the fate of the dead ones who cannot express an opinion. Whoever transcribed Dean's remarks could have done what my teachers always told me to do — never start a sentence with a conjunction — and made the last two sentences into one. If they'd done that, it would have been clear that's what he meant.

I may have mentioned this before but on the campaign trail during the '64 election, Barry Goldwater gave a speech where he accidentally got his words confused and wound up coming out in favor of the spread of Communism. It was just bad phrasing, a flaw that every public speaker displays on some occasion. Back then, everyone — reporters and his opponents — just gave him a pass on it. They knew what he meant to say and the press reported what he meant to say, not what he actually said. Today, it's almost like they look at every utterance and wonder if there's some way to strip-quote or punctuate it to make it a hotter news story. Unless of course, it's George W. Bush and they've decided that awkward sentence structure is part of his charm.

• Posted at 2:47 PM · LINK

Political Thoughts

While everyone's looking at Bush's approval ratings, I find it more interesting to look at his disapproval ratings. I think politicians are not elected these days so much as others are defeated. The latest Newsweek poll has Bush at 50% approval which is not great but not fatal. At this point in their respective first terms, Carter had a 52% approval rating and lost badly, while Clinton had a 47% approval rate and won easily.

If I were Karl Rove, the only part of that poll that would worry me is where 47% "strongly" want to see Bush defeated and I'd want to know how strongly. I get the feeling that what will be different about this election from the others I've lived through is that we will see Democrats become more emotional and fervent than usual. In the 2000 election, I never felt that one single person I spoke with or even heard on the news was that passionate to see Al Gore in the White House. I didn't think the other side cared any more about George W. Bush, but they did care about electing a Republican, if only to end The Clinton Era. In fact, the only real fervor I sensed in that whole contest came from those who wanted to repudiate Bill Clinton.

Clinton's disapproval ratings were no higher than most presidents'. At this point in his first term, it was around 40%. Still, based on nothing more than my own reading of the news and chatting with friends, I got the feeling that the 40% who disapproved of him really, really disapproved of him. Reagan, at various points in his presidency, had a pretty high disapproval rating but the folks who comprised it never seemed to feel that the future of mankind depended on the defeat of Reaganism. Similarly, I never felt Clinton supporters hated Bob Dole or the last George Bush as much as their supporters hated Bill and Hillary. (And in '88, as in 2000, I didn't think anyone was particularly passionate for Dukakis or that Bush, but the latter had people on his side who were adamant about not seeing The Reagan Years end. One might argue that neither Bush got elected on his own positives; that the first coasted on good feelings about Reagan and the second on bad feelings about Clinton.)

As I look over the Democratic contenders, I don't see anyone who looks like they can arouse any significant amount of passion in a positive sense. If it's Kerry-Edwards or Dean-Clark or whatever, most people who fight for them will merely be passionate to defeat Bush-Cheney. Given the way a lot of Democrats (and even some Independents and fringe Republicans) are coming to view Bush not just as a poor president but as someone who's genuinely destroying America, that may be enough.

• Posted at 1:50 PM · LINK