Do you all know Thom Hartmann?
Posted: January 4th, 2005, 11:59 pm
by judih
Aside from being a pioneer in the hunter/farmer theory for ADHD, he's a sure-fire believer in right and wrong of a political sort.
This is his latest e-mailing.
Dialing In For Democracy - Today Is Critical
by Thom Hartmann
Jeff Taylor is one of Vermont's three electors - representatives elected by the citizens of Vermont to vote for President of the United States. He and his two peers have joined the electors of several other states in signing resolutions asking their state's congressional delegation to protest the Ohio slate of electors.
"If they can have fair elections in Kiev," Taylor told me, "why not in Cleveland?"
Here's what troubles Taylor:
If you flip a coin a hundred times, odds are that around fifty times it will come up heads and fifty times tails. In reality, it may be 49-51 or even 47-53, but it will always pretty much evenly split. That's the nature of random events, including random errors and mistakes.
So if the tens of thousands of election "irregularities" being reported all across the nation - but particularly in Ohio, Florida, New Mexico, and North Carolina - showed "irregularities" worked randomly to the benefit of both parties, it would be easy to say that we have a broken, but not a stolen or hacked, election system. But that was not the case.
In nearly every case now documented, producing odds not of 50:50 but, according to credible statisticians, sometimes rising to 1:250,000,000, "irregularities" seem always to favor George W. Bush or other Republican candidates. These include:
-machine errors
-misplaced machines
-unmailed absentee ballots
-certification of more votes than registered voters in some areas, and dramatically low voter turnouts in other areas
-modem-connected voting machines and tabulators
-different standards for provisional ballot recounts in different areas
-phony companies registering voters and then tearing up the registrations of people who checked one party but not the other
-voting machines defaulting to a particular candidate or 'jumping' by recording a vote for one candidate when another's button was pushed
-exit polls not corresponding with reported votes
-voting elections officials creating what look like phony election -machine poll tapes and tossing original, signed tabulations in the garbage.
And while the vast majority of the "irregularities" in 2004 are breaking to the benefit of George W. Bush, they also did so in 2000, and for Republicans generally in 2002.
It's time to start using the "F" word. George W. Bush was made President of the United States in 2000 by fraud, and apparently has done it again.
First, 2000.
As The New York Times reported on November 12, 2001, in an article titled "Examining The Vote: The Overview" by Ford Fessenden and John M. Broder, a media consortium was pulled together to actually count every questionable ballot in the 2000 Florida election.
The media consortium included The Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Tribune Company, The Washington Post, The Associated Press, The St. Petersburg Times, The Palm Beach Post and CNN. The group hired the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago in January to examine the ballots. The research group employed teams of three workers they called coders to examine each undervoted ballot and mark down what they saw in detail. Three coders provided a bulwark against inaccuracy or bias in the coding. For overvotes, one coder was used because there was seldom disagreement among examiners in a trial run using three coders.
The data produced by the ballot review allows scrutiny of the disputed Florida vote under a large number of situations and using a variety of different standards that might have applied in a hand recount, including the appearance of a dimple, a chad dangling by one or more corners and a cleanly punched card.
The result clearly demonstrated that Al Gore won the 2000 Florida vote. But the Supreme Court, in the lawsuit initiated by George W. Bush against Al Gore now known as Bush v. Gore, ruled that "irreparable harm" might be done to candidate Bush if such a recount was performed in Florida by Florida authorities. Justice Antonin Scalia, in his concurring majority opinion in Bush v. Gore, wrote that "The counting of votes that are of questionable legality does in my view threaten irreparable harm to petitioner [George W. Bush], and to the country, by casting a cloud upon what he claims to be the legitimacy of his election."
And Scalia was right, if "irreparable harm" means that counting all the votes may lead to the petitioner [Bush] "losing an election." When the Consortium examined all the ballots statewide, noted the Times, "The findings indicate that Mr. Gore might have eked out a victory if he had pursued in court a course like the one he publicly advocated when he called on the state to 'count all the votes.'"
(To his eternal credit, Justice John Paul Stevens dissented, writing that: "Counting every legally cast vote cannot constitute irreparable harm. On the other hand, there is a danger that a stay may cause irreparable harm to the respondents [Gore]- and, more importantly, the public at large- because of the risk that 'the entry of the stay would be tantamount to a decision on the merits in favor of the applicants [Bush].'")
Further, "In a finding rich with irony," note the Times writers, "a statewide recount -- could have produced enough votes to tilt the election his [Gore's] way, no matter what standard was chosen to judge voter intent."
Count the dimpled chads or not. Count the overvotes or not. Count the pregnant chads or not. No matter WHAT standard was chosen - Gore won Florida in 2000.
And that doesn't begin to examine the true fraud that occurred in Florida when Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris, according to the NAACP and Greg Palast's reporting on the BBC, illegally removed tens of thousands of African American voters from the voter rolls - a crime that is still in the courts and has yet to be prosecuted. (An amazing documentary of this is the DVD "Unprecedented".) Or, as I reported in an article commissioned by MoveOn.org in July of 2003, many computer irregularities across the nation also drew into question the legitimacy of the 2000 and 2002 elections.
And now, in 2004, we are again visited by a Stalinesque fusion of cronies funding and controlling the election apparatus, national media intimidated into silence, and a populace so preoccupied with daily survival concerns - and uneasy about being identified as "troublemakers" by a new, highly centralized state security apparatus - that they don't have the means or time to react.
Yet react we must.
Congressman John Conyers has conducted hearings in Ohio, which uncovered sufficient evidence to call into question - at least in the mind of the Congressman himself and many associated with him - the validity of the Ohio vote.
The Electoral College was modeled after a form of governance used by the British before the Norman invasion in 1066, as documented in The History of England As Well Ecclesiastical As Civil by Paul de Rapin Thoyras, one of the two books that Thomas Jefferson repeatedly cited as the most important histories every written.
It's been out of print for two centuries, but in my copy, printed in London in 1728, Thoyras writes, presaging language later re-used in the U.S. Constitution, "Now in order to preserve a perfect Union, it was necessary some way of communication and intercourse between them [the people in remote locations and their government] shou'd be established. This was done by the means of a Wittena-Gemot or Assembly of Wise Men, who were the Representatives of the whole Nation. This Method the Saxons brought with them from Germany, where all publick affairs were transacted in such like conventions...[including their] Presidents." (Italics from the original.)
And now our wise elders - Electors like Jeff Taylor - are telling us they believe our elections may have been corrupted.
Section II, Article 2 of the Constitution, amended by the Twelfth Amendment in 1804, create and define the Electoral College, modeled by the Framers after the Saxon Wittena-Gemot. Each state chooses its own electors any way it wants, although all today do so by election of the people.
Electors have already met in the various states to vote, but that vote will not be opened until Thursday, January 6th. If Conyers' protest is matched by the protest of at least one single senator, then the House and Senate retire to their respective chambers for a maximum of two hours to debate the legitimacy of the Ohio (and, possibly, other) electoral slates. After two hours, with a maximum of 5 minutes for any member to speak, a vote is taken. If both the House and the Senate vote by majority to sustain the challenge, then the presidential vote goes to the House of Representatives, where each state has a single vote.
Given that Republicans control both the House and Senate, and a majority of states were "red" in this past election, even if a senator joins Conyers it won't change the outcome of this election, unless between now and Thursday such massive, credible evidence of election-changing vote fraud is presented that even Republicans will agree that the election was stolen. Given how often Republicans in the House and Senate have placed the interest of their party's power above the needs and interests of democracy or the nation in the past few decades, it's extremely unlikely that a challenge will result in a change in the election.
But - vitally - it will put the issues of vote fraud in America on the table in a way that even the mainstream media can no longer ignore. And it may lead to getting private, Republican-affiliated corporations out of handling our votes in secret, and to other electoral reforms such as IRV and public financing of elections. It could be a huge step in pulling us back from the brink of the Stalinist state the Bush administration seems determined to lead us into.
Rallies are being held in Columbus, Ohio and Washington, DC, and news stories of them are easily found on this and other progressive news sites. But for those who can't travel, perhaps the most important step you can take today is to call your two senators at 1-800-839-5276 and ask them to join Conyers in his protest of the Ohio electors. This is particularly important if you live in California, West Virginia, Minnesota, Iowa, Vermont, Massachusetts, Michigan, Maryland, Illinois, or Maine, as those state have senators who may be more inclined to join Conyers than most.
Make your call now. It's one of the last ways we still have available to access our elected representatives without a Republican corporation in the middle.
Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored Award-winning best-selling author and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk show.
www.thomhartmann.com His most recent books are "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal Protection," "We The People," "The Edison Gene", and "What Would Jefferson Do?."
Posted: January 5th, 2005, 1:31 pm
by Zlatko Waterman
Dear judih:
Thom Hartmann's commentaries are always well-written, thoroughly researched, clear and clarifying. Thanks for posting this one.
Mark Danner's article in the current NY Review of Books ( below) is an illuminating commentary on the "moral values" pundit blather and a cross-sectional x-ray of the American electorate:
Zlatko
(paste)
Feature
How Bush Really Won
By Mark Danner
1.
"I have won what I call political capital and now I intend to spend it."
—George W. Bush, November 3, 2004
Driving north from Tampa on Florida's Route 75 on November 1, as the battle over who would hold political power in America was reaching a climax but the struggle over what that battle meant had yet to begin, I put down the top of my rented green convertible, turned the talk radio voices up to blaring, and commenced reading the roadside. Beside me billboards flew past, one hard upon another, as if some errant giant had cut a great deck of cards and fanned them out along each shoulder. Hour by hour, as the booming salesman's voice of proud Floridian Rush Limbaugh rumbled from the radio, warning gravely of the dangers of "voting for bin Laden" ("Haven't you noticed that bin Laden is using Democratic talking points?"), and other ominous voices reminded listeners of the "hundreds of votes" Senator Kerry cast "against our national defense" ("In a time of terror, when our enemies are gathering...can we afford to take that risk?"), I watched rush by, interspersed with the blaring offers of "Florida Citrus! One Bag $1!" and "Need Help With Sinkholes?," a series of perhaps fifty garish signs announcing an approaching "Adult Toy Café!" and "Adult Toy Extravaganza!" and then "We Bare All!" and finally, the capper, "All Nude—Good Food— Truckers Welcome!"
It wasn't long before this billboard parade had acquired its stark spiritual counterpoint—"Jesus Is Still the Answer!"—and by the time I reached the promised "extravaganza"—a sad and windowless two-room shack just off the highway, smaller than most of the signs advertising it—I found, standing just down the road from the pathetic little house of sin, a resplendent white church more than twice its size. In the world of American hucksterism, the sin may be the draw but the payoff's always in redemption.
This was perhaps thirty-six hours before an army of self-interested commentators, self-appointed spiritual leaders, and television pundits hot for a simple storyline had seized on the answers to a clumsily posed exit poll question—more than one respondent in five, offered seven choices, had selected "moral values" as their "most important issue"—and used those answers to transform the results of the 2004 election into a rousing statement of Americans' disgust with abortion, promiscuity, R-rated movies, gay marriage, late-night television, and other "Hollywood-type" moral laxity. Some, like the Reverend Bob Jones III, president of Bob Jones University, wrote the President with admirable directness to remind him what the election meant, and what he now owed:
In your re-election, God has graciously granted America—though she doesn't deserve it—a reprieve from the agenda of paganism. You have been given a mandate.... Don't equivocate. Put your agenda on the front burner and let it boil. You owe the liberals nothing. They despise you because they despise your Christ....
Undoubtedly, you will have opportunity to appoint many conservative judges and exercise forceful leadership with the Congress in passing legislation that is defined by biblical norm regarding the family, sexuality, sanctity of life, religious freedom, freedom of speech, and limited government. You have four years—a brief time only—to leave an imprint for righteousness upon this nation that brings with it the blessings of Almighty God....
If you have weaklings around you who do not share your biblical values, shed yourself of them.
And yet the voters of Union County, Florida's smallest, whom I found crowding the election supervisor's office in tiny Lake Butler, seemed unaware that they had been impelled to vote by a newfound quest for redemption. In Lake Butler, turnout was higher than anyone could remember; in Union County, voter registration had risen by 25 percent over 2000, when I had last visited.[1] But none of the voters who spoke to me there volunteered a word about "moral values." Their answers tended to be much more concrete. "It's because of 9/11— you know, because of the terrorism," said Babs Montpetit—a.k.a. Miss Babs, election supervisor of Union County since 1985. "Because of the terrorism people are afraid not to vote." Through the window behind her I could see Lake Butler's main street, with its scattering of stores and bars—a tiny, isolated place, with barely seven thousand registered voters, far from any major city. Why should its citizens worry about terrorism? "Why, who could have expected that would happen, that business in New York?" Miss Babs asked me in return, leaning forward and lowering her voice. "You just don't know."
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Back in the car, I turned on the radio to find the Florida news feed, which led with this story:
A suspicious package that seemed to be vibrating forced the closing of the State Board of Elections today. The parcel, it turned out, was an ordinary package that happened to have been placed next to an air conditioner, the breeze from which accounted for the apparent vibrating action....
This embarrassing incident, which in other times might have been treated as a humorous item about the haplessness of government officials, was reported in dead seriousness: a dark dispatch from the front lines. As I left Lake Butler, stepping on the accelerator, I turned the radio up and the air around me filled again with the booming voice of Rush Limbaugh, in full and impressive rant:
Osama bin Laden cannot launch an attack on the United States of America. Osama bin Laden can only deliver a tape, and on that tape, bin Laden appeals to the very appeasers in this country who would allow him to gain strength by agreeing with what he says and voting for the man who is being quoted by bin Laden. John Kerry, as much as Michael Moore, was quoted by Osama bin Laden in that video that we all saw.... Michael Moore is not on the ballot; John Kerry is. Osama bin Laden parroting John Kerry in his tape on Friday. We have a unique responsibility to lead the world in confronting and defeating this evil threat....
Returning to the days of appeasement, trying to meet a "global test" of world opinion, ignoring threats from hostile nations and groups is a deadly mistake we simply can't afford to make.... The Democrat Party in this country is eager to point to the things bin Laden said and suggest that he is right—a man who happily murdered three thousand Americans and is eager to do so over and over and over again! You say, "Rush, I haven't heard the Democrats say that." Oh, you can find it on their Web sites. You can find people who are going to vote for John Kerry who have said this. You can find people on various Democrat Web sites who are excited bin Laden said what he said. They're hoping for an Osama smackdown of Bush, if I may quote one of the things I saw.
Interspersed with Limbaugh's extraordinarily fluid and persuasively deceptive tirade—heard, according to his home station in Sacramento, by "nearly 20 million people over 600 stations"—came the political advertisements, one after another, which turned skillfully around a concentrated version of the same plotline: First, the threat America faces today is as great as any in the country's history. Second, that threat makes this election "the most important in history," because if Americans make "the wrong choice" they could make themselves and their families more vulnerable. Third, therefore, Americans must vote, and must make "the right choice." Fear is joined skillfully to risk: a risk that is personal and looming, and—most important—that could very well increase if the election goes the wrong way.
The script of the famous "Wolves" television ad, with its simple image of a pack of ravenous, circling carnivores readying for the attack, embodied this plotline in perhaps its purest form:
In an increasingly dangerous world.... Even after the first terrorist attack on America...John Kerry and the liberals in Congress voted to slash America's intelligence operations. By six billion dollars.... Cuts so deep they would have weakened America's defenses. And weakness attracts those who are waiting to do America harm.
A vote for Bush is a vote to stave off that weakness. More important, a failure to vote could make way for that "weakening of America's defenses." As I headed to Jacksonville, grave voices from the radio warned again and again of what was at stake:
John Kerry. The most liberal man in the Senate. The most liberal person to ever run for president. He voted to cut our military.... To severely cut our intelligence agencies.... He voted for higher taxes 350 times.... And now he wants to be our President.... We live in a dangerous world that requires strong and steady leadership. John Kerry is a risky choice for America...a risk we cannot take.
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This rhetoric of risk carries forward a narrative that Republicans began shaping soon after the attacks of September 11, 2001, and that came boldly to the fore as a political strategy the following May, when Vice President Cheney declared that the statements of several Democratic senators, who had rather timidly questioned some of the decisions made in conducting the war in Afghanistan, were "unworthy of national leaders in a time of war." Though this bold shot across the bow essentially put an end to any overt Democratic criticism of the administration on the conduct of the war on terror, Republicans clearly realized that when it came to terrorism and national security, as Karl Rove observed during a speech to the Republican National Committee in January 2002, they could "go to the country on this issue, because [Americans] trust the Republican Party to do a better job of protecting and strengthening America's military might and thereby protecting America."
That autumn Republicans triumphed in the midterm elections, largely because they effectively exploited Americans' apparent willingness to believe that the Republicans could better protect the country. This strategy was displayed most dramatically in Saxby Chambliss's victory over the incumbent Max Cleland in the Senate race in Georgia, in which the challenger portrayed Cleland, a highly decorated veteran who had lost three limbs in Vietnam, as an ally of bin Laden. Though the claims were obviously trumped up—they rested on the fact that Cleland had not instantly voted for the creation of the Department of Homeland Security—the images of Cleland's and bin Laden's faces side by side in effect doomed the incumbent.
The attacks of September 11 restored to Republicans their traditional political advantage in matters of "national security" and "national defense" —an advantage the party had lost with the end of the cold war—and Republicans capitalized on that advantage, not only by running President Bush as "a war president," as he repeatedly identified himself, but by presenting a vote for John Kerry—whom the Republicans succeeded in defining (with a good deal of help from the Swift Boat Veterans, and from Kerry himself) as indecisive, opportunistic, and untrustworthy—as a vote that was inherently, dangerously risky. The emphasis placed on Bush's much-promoted personal strengths—decisiveness, determination, reliability, transparency—served to base his candidacy at once on "moral values" and on "national security," in effect making possession of the first essential to protect the second. Bush's decisiveness was put forward as the flip side of Kerry's dangerous vacillation, the answer to the threat of weakness Kerry was alleged to pose. This equation was dramatized, perfected, and repeated, with much discipline and persistence, in thousands of advertisements, speeches, and "talking heads" discussion programs on conservative networks, especially Fox. (In Lake Butler, Miss Babs's husband, she told me, "watches only Fox News. He believes all the other channels are propaganda.") Despite all the talk about "moral values," the 2004 election turned on a fulcrum of fear.
MARGINS OF VICTORY
Republican Presidents Reelected During the Last Hundred Years
President Popular Vote Electoral Vote
1904 Theodore Roosevelt 17% 196
1956 Dwight D. Eisenhower 16% 384
1972 Richard M. Nixon 23% 503
1984 Ronald Reagan 18% 512
2004 George Bush 2% 34
2.
Famously, as I have mentioned, more than one in five Americans—22 percent—who spoke to pollsters as they left the voting places said, when presented with seven choices, that their "most important issue" had been "moral values," and of these four out of five cast their votes for George Bush. On the other hand, 19 percent selected "terrorism" and another 15 percent chose "Iraq," meaning that more than one in three voters said the war—the Iraq war or the "war on terror"—was their most important issue. In fact, the most striking single result of the exit polls was Bush's much stronger appeal to women—many of them, apparently, the much-discussed "security moms," who were thought to be especially concerned about protecting their families. All of these numbers and conclusions, needless to say, bear further scrutiny.
Using an exit poll to draw precise conclusions from a national election is like using a very blurry magnifying glass to analyze the brushstrokes in a huge and complicated pointillist painting. Our tools for judging what elections "mean" are quite crude, depending as they do on the willingness of voters to speak to pollsters, on their ability to speak honestly about the choices they made, and on their particular talents for understanding and expressing their own motives. As we saw this year—when faulty exit polls that suggested an overwhelming Kerry victory significantly distorted election-day press coverage—they can often produce downright wrong conclusions. Despite the "scientific" feel that numbers lend to any analysis, there is more art to it than science and, despite the impression that election and analysis are starkly separate, much analysis, as the Reverend Jones's letter to President Bush suggests, simply carries forward beyond the election a self-interested political narrative that preceded it.
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If one stands back a bit and lets the drifting smoke of the pundits and the preachers and the exit poll analysts begin to clear, three interesting facts about the 2004 election stand out. The first is that the election was very close —historically close, in fact. The table on this page shows the margins of victory, in percentage of the popular vote and in electoral votes, of sitting Republican presidents who have won reelection during the last hundred years.
As these numbers show, incumbency is a huge advantage; nonetheless, Bush's reelection was a squeaker, the closest for a Republican in more than a century.[2] Four years after the historically close election of 2000, and after a hard-fought eight-month campaign in which the candidates, the parties, and so-called "independent" groups spent more than a billion dollars to woo voters, the electoral map hardly changed. Only three small states switched sides: the Democrats picked up New Hampshire (four electoral votes) and the Republicans very narrowly won Iowa (eight) and New Mexico (five). Bush had a net gain of only nine electoral votes, which, added to the seven that the Republicans gained through reapportionment, gave him his narrow margin of victory.[3]
Had fewer than 60,000 Ohio voters decided to cast their ballots for the Democrat rather than the Republican (and according to the exit polls one voter in twenty decided whom to vote for on election day), John Kerry would have won Ohio's twenty electoral votes and with them the presidency—and would have entered the White House in January 2005, as George W. Bush had done in January 2001, having won the votes of fewer Americans than the man he defeated. About 2,991,437 fewer, which, as I write, is George W. Bush's margin of victory, out of 122,124,783 votes cast for president.
Which leads to the second interesting fact about the 2004 election: a great many more people turned out to vote, nearly seventeen million more, than turned out four years ago. Nearly 60 percent of those Americans eligible cast ballots in 2004, an increase in turnout of almost 6 percent.[4] In the so-called battleground states, where vast sums were spent on advertising and one could not escape the barrage of political messages blaring from television and radio and pouring out of the telephone and the mailbox, the increase in turnout was even greater. A million and a half more Floridians cast ballots than had four years before: in 2000—itself an intensely fought election in which turnout substantially increased—fewer than 56 percent of eligible Floridians voted; in 2004 more than 65 percent did.
This leads, finally, to the third interesting fact about the election, which is that in the days leading up to it many of the "indicators" which political professionals have traditionally taken to suggest whether or not an incumbent will win were running distinctly against President Bush. Most notably, more Americans (55 percent) said they thought the country was "headed in the wrong direction" than those who said it was headed in the right one, and fewer than half of Americans polled (49 percent) said that they approved of the President's performance in office. More disapproved than approved of the President's handling of foreign policy (49 percent to 45 percent) and of the economy (51 percent to 43 percent). Finally more Americans disapproved than approved of the President's handling of Iraq (50 percent to 45 percent), his most important foreign policy, and, perhaps most strikingly, more than two Americans in three told pollsters that Mr. Bush's tax cuts—his signal domestic accomplishment—had either been bad for the economy (17 percent) or had not made much difference (51 percent).[5]
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The President went into the election, then, with Americans mildly pessimistic about the direction of the country and broadly disapproving of his performance and his policies. Most polls showed the race "too close to call," and many of the major indicators, "historically" speaking, suggested the incumbent would lose. Small wonder that so many experts, including apparently the President's own political team, were willing to believe the election-day exit polls that into the early evening showed their man losing by a considerable margin. (The widely circulated numbers from the respected polling firm Zogby International, for example, showed Mr. Kerry winning 311 electoral votes). The fact was that though President Bush was personally popular, many of his major policies were not. The problem for the Bush campaign was how to turn attention away from policies voters didn't like —particularly the President's decisions on Iraq and his conduct of the war there—toward policies they approved of—particularly his conduct of "the war on terror" (into which Iraq would be "folded")—and toward his personal qualities.
3.
If your babies were left all alone in the dead of night, who would you rather have setting there on the porch—John Kerry and his snowboard or George W. with his shotgun?
—Sean Michaels, professional wrestler, warming up the crowd, Tinker Field, October 30, 2004
On a beautiful October evening three days before the election, Orlando's Tinker Field had become an enormous bowl filled with 17,000 screaming, chanting Bush partisans floating in a sea of red, white, and blue. On the stadium wall hung a great fifty-foot high sign proclaiming that George W. Bush was "MOVING AMERICA FORWARD!" Inside, flanking the stage in letters that dwarfed it, and echoed by smaller signs bobbing up and down everywhere in the crowd, was the terse slogan "AMERICA: SAFER STRONGER BETTER!" And then, precisely placed around the stadium in enormous letters, were the words on which the campaign was built: "STRENGTH! LEADERSHIP! CHARACTER! INTEGRITY!" Disciplined, organized, relentless, the Bush campaign would never be accused of subtlety.
"Well..., I'm just so proud of the way he handled 9/11—I mean, that was...amazing!" Dot Richardson-Pinto told me as we sat together near the podium. When I'd asked why she supported the President, she had had to search a moment for an answer, and not entirely because she couldn't understand how it could be that anyone wouldn't. She'd had to think for a moment, I came to realize, because her ardor had so much more to do with who he was than with what he did. And who he was could be summarized by those four giant words looming over the stage.
"It doesn't matter if the man can talk," Ms. Richardson-Pinto told me. "Sometimes, when someone's real articulate you can't trust what he says, you know?" As the security helicopters circled overhead, and the crowd launched into yet one more chant of "Kerry is scary!" I was struck again by how precisely the campaign had managed to define Bush's strengths in perfect contradistinction to what they had defined as Kerry's weaknesses, and then to devote all its resources to emphasizing both. Every repetition of what Bush was—and the repetitions were unending, and intricately varied —was crafted to be a perfect reminder of what his opponent was not. Practically every word emitted by the campaign, whether through the thousands and thousands of television and radio commercials, or the words of the campaign spokesmen, or the speeches of the candidate himself, moved in gorgeously disciplined lockstep to drive home to voters not only who George W. Bush was but who his opponent was not. As Bush became more and more Bush ("STRENGTH! LEADERSHIP! CHARACTER! INTEGRITY!"), Kerry, little-known, chilly, distant, was turned into the anti-Bush, a weak, shallow, flipflopping, shillyshallyer whose every word was an attempt to deceive Americans about who he really was.
In blue shirt and black slacks the President strode into the stadium, flanked by his wife and brother Jeb, and raised his hands to the rock-star reception. When the thunderous chants —"Viva Bush! Viva Bush!"—had finally dropped off to a scattering of shouts, he launched into a speech whose terms I knew well but whose effectiveness, with Ms. Richardson-Pinto sitting beside me, I only now understood. George W. Bush seemed to be speaking directly to her, to be bringing her into his family:
Sometimes I'm a little too blunt— I get that from my mother. [Huge cheers] Sometimes I mangle the English language—I get that from my dad. [Laughter and cheers]
But you always know where I stand. You can't say that for my opponent....
The fact is that all progress on other issues depends on the safety of our citizens. The most solemn duty of the American president is to protect the American people. [Loud cheers. Chants of "Four More Years! Four More Years! Four More Years!"]
The president must make tough decisions and stand behind them. Especially in time of war mixed signals only confuse our friends and embolden our enemies.
If America shows uncertainty or weakness in these troubling times the world will drift toward tragedy —and this will not happen on my watch!
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In a few blunt lines Bush had subsumed everything else beneath the preeminent shining banner of the war on terror, and subsumed that war beneath his own reputation for forthrightness, decisiveness, and strength. And he had identified uncertainty, hesitation, vacillation—even the sort of nit-picking that would seek to separate the war in Iraq from the war on terror —as not simply mistaken or foolish but dangerous. "Relentless"..."Steadfast"..."Determined": these words came fast and strong, again and again. And then the climactic line: "We will fight the terrorists across the globe so we do not have to fight them here at home!" It drew a huge response and after the applause and chanting had finally died down he followed up with his most important words about the current shooting war:
I will use every asset at our disposal to protect the American people and one of the best assets we have is freedom! Freedom is powerful!
Freedom is not America's gift to the world, it is the Almighty's gift to everyone.... Iraq is still dangerous but Iraq will have free elections in January—think how far that country has come!
On good days and bad days, whether the polls are up or the polls are down, I am determined to protect the American people!
The Iraq war was not only irrevocably part of the war on terror—who could think, gazing at the car bombs and beheadings every night on television, that they were any different?—it had become a leading part of the ideological response to the threat of terror: a first step in the expansion of the holy cause of freedom. As Reagan had dared to go beyond staunch anticommunism and imagine a world after communism's collapse, so Bush looked beyond the present chaotic world of terror to see a blessed land of freedom.6 ("In this election, my opponent has spent a lot of time talking about a day that is gone. I'm talking about the day that is coming.") It was a striking vision, clear and absolutely simple to understand. And it linked, firmly and directly, the so-called "moral values" of justice, fairness, and the Almighty to the cause of national security, and specifically to the war on terror that the Bush people kept relentlessly at the campaign's heart. "Terror," "Iraq," and "moral values," supposedly separate "important issues," had been seamlessly joined.
Of course whatever its virtues as a campaign theme, the picture the President offered was not especially "fact-dependent." Many well-known facts— on which Kerry, in his campaign, had laid such stress—were either irrelevant to it (the missing weapons of mass destruction, which went unmentioned) or directly contradicted by it (the failure to demonstrate connections between Iraq and the attacks of September 11). But the facts did not matter—not necessarily because those in the stadium were ignorant of them, though some certainly were, but because the President was offering in their place a worldview that was whole, complete, comprehensible, and thus impermeable to statements of fact that clearly contradicted it. The thousands cheering around me in that Orlando stadium, and the many others who would come to support Bush on election day, faced a stark choice: either discard the facts, or give up the clear and comforting worldview that they contradicted. They chose to disregard the facts.
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Two weeks before the election, after the Senate Intelligence Committee report on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and the Duelfer Report, and after intensive news coverage of the administration's failure to find such weapons in Iraq, nearly three Bush supporters in four told pollsters they believed Iraq had either had weapons of mass destruction (47 percent) or had had a "major program" to develop them (26 percent). Nearly three in five said they believed that the widely publicized Duelfer Report, which directly contradicted this, had in fact confirmed it. Three in four believed that Iraq had either been directly involved in the September 11 attacks (20 percent) or had given al-Qaeda "substantial support" (55 percent), and nearly three in ten wrongly believed that the 9/11 Commission had confirmed that they had. Similar majorities believed that the President and his administration still publicly supported these positions.
Many of the Bush supporters I spoke to were educated, well-informed people. They watched the news and took pleasure in debating politics. And yet they clung to views about important matters of fact that were demonstrably wrong. Steven Kull, the public opinion expert at the University of Maryland who authored the study from which these numbers are drawn, acknowledges that although one reason they "cling so tightly to beliefs that have been so visibly refuted...is that they continue to hear the Bush administration confirming these beliefs," the prevalence, and persistence, of these misperceptions is "probably not due to a simple failure to pay attention to the news." Rather, Kull writes, "Bush supporters cling to these beliefs because they are necessary for their support for the decision to go to war with Iraq":
Asked whether the US should have gone to war with Iraq if US intelligence had concluded that Iraq was not making WMD or providing support to al Qaeda, 58 percent of Bush supporters said the US should not have, and 61 percent assume that in this case the president would not have. To support the president and to accept that he took the US to war based on mistaken assumptions is difficult to bear, especially in light of the continuing costs in terms of lives and money. Apparently, to avoid this cognitive dissonance, Bush supporters suppress awareness of unsettling information.[7]
This analysis suggests the difficulties Kerry faced in pressing home his highly "fact-dependent" argument that the Iraq war was separate from the war on terror and thus a mistaken distraction from it. Not only did accepting the point require a good deal of sophistication and knowledge, not only did it seem to contradict the evidence on Americans' television screens each night, which often showed vivid depictions of terrorism in Iraq; it also seemed to imply to some voters that they should take what must have seemed an unpatriotic position. For if they accepted the false pretenses on which the war had been based, how could they go on supporting it, as Kerry, somewhat illogically and even dishonestly, seemed to be asking them to do?
Those running the Bush campaign clearly counted on the talent and influence of impressive propagandists like Limbaugh, and the help they received from an often acquiescent mainstream press. More, they counted on the President's reputation for forthrightness, together with the political folk wisdom that many people, particularly "during wartime," believe "the man, not the fact." When Bush, in full rhetorical flower in Tinker Field, declared to his delirious audience that "Americans need a president who doesn't think terrorism is 'a nuisance,'" my neighbor Ms. Richardson-Pinto nudged me with her elbow and shouted over the laughter and cheers, "Do you believe Kerry said that?" Actually, I shouted into her ear, Kerry hadn't said that, and then I paraphrased for her the actual quotation:
We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance. As a former law enforcement person, I know we're never going to end prostitution... [and] illegal gambling. But we're going to reduce it, organized crime, to a level where...it's something that you continue to fight, but it's not threatening the fabric of your life.[8]
Hardly exceptional; indeed, Bush himself had only weeks before said something very similar. Ms. Richardson-Pinto, a well-educated, worldly woman —a doctor, and a two-time Olympic gold medalist in women's softball— listened to me intently, nodded politely, began to form a question, and then, thinking better of it, looked at me for a moment longer before turning back to the President. She'd had a choice what—or rather whom—to believe; and she'd made it.
4.
Saddam would never have disarmed.
—George W. Bush, first presidential debate,September 30, 2004
Seven o'clock on the evening of Election Day and the office of the election supervisor in downtown Jacksonville was mobbed, encircled by a raggedy line of hundreds and hundreds of late voters. In the street in front an enormous crowd of Democrats chanted, cheered, and sang, filling every inch of space and spilling out into the streets. Car after car, horns blaring, made its way carefully through the crowd, the drivers leaning out to administer high fives and to cheer, and cheer again. When word of the early exit-poll numbers seeming to confirm an overwhelming Kerry victory swept through the crowd, hundreds broke into song, to the tune of the old civil rights classic, "Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around":
Ain't gonna let nobody steal my vote
Steal my vote, steal my vote
Ain't gonna let nobody steal my vote....
It had been Jacksonville where in 2000 the infamous "caterpillar ballot" had led officials to discard tens of thousands of votes, votes cast overwhelmingly by African-Americans. As I stood watching the dancing and the celebration—"We gonna elect one, not select one!"—the sense people had of justice finally being done was vivid. I had felt it all day as I went from polling place to polling place in the downtown neighborhoods of the city —they were overwhelmed with voters, and overwhelmed with a sense that a wrong would be righted.
What I didn't find was any sense of strong support for John Kerry as a politician or a leader, or even a feeling of familiarity with him. The personality of Bush seemed vivid among voters, whether they admired him or hated him; the personality of Kerry was faint, indistinct, and where I found its mark most strongly was among those Bush voters who saw the Massachusetts senator, or the depiction of him that the Bush campaign had succeeded in creating, as a threat to their security. To counteract this Kerry would have had to become a known quality, trusted, familiar; but even after the hundreds of millions spent on advertising and his strong performance in the debates, for most voters he seemed a distant figure. He never entered that great stock company of celebrities—the "Oprah touring company"—that ordinary Americans welcome into their living rooms and believe they have somehow come to know. Love him or hate him, the President had long since taken his place as a recognizable, powerful personality in that company; John Kerry never did.
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I had seen Kerry speak two nights before in Tampa, before a crowd fully as delirious as the one that had greeted George W. Bush the night before. Though the Kerry crowd was recognizably younger and, for lack of a better word, "hipper," most of those present would not have seemed out of place at either event. Partly hidden behind a forest of yellow "Two More Days!" signs, Kerry, by far the tallest person on stage, stretched and shifted as he was introduced, raising and lowering himself on the balls of his feet: he was plainly exhausted. Nonetheless he gave a powerful, well-crafted speech, though built around the uninspired phrases "a fresh start" and "first we must choose." And then he turned to Iraq:
The President tells us that in Iraq, his "strategy is succeeding...." But every day on our TV screens, we see the hard truths. We see the consequences of this President's decision to rush to war without a plan to win the peace: the loss of over 1,100 of our brave men and women in uniform. A cost of $225 billion with billions more on the way. Entire regions controlled by insurgents and terrorists. By pushing our allies aside, George Bush's catastrophic mismanagement of this war has left America to bear almost 90 percent of the costs and 90 percent of the coalition casualties. We relied on Afghan warlords instead of American troops to hunt down Osama bin Laden, and the man responsible for murdering more than three thousand Americans walked away.... On Tuesday, we have the opportunity to set a new course in Iraq...open up a new chapter in our relationship with the rest of the world... and do whatever it takes to defend America and keep our troops safe.... When I'm president, I will bring other nations to our side and train Iraqis so that we can succeed and bring our troops home. As president, I will fight a tougher, smarter, more effective war on terror. We will hunt down, capture, and kill the terrorists wherever they are. I defended this country as a young man and I will defend it as president.
Kerry's indictment of Bush's stewardship of the war was strong, but he offered little by way of an alternative; his "new course in Iraq" amounted to bringing "other nations to our side" to train Iraqis. He would "do whatever it takes to defend America"—a broad, empty assertion that depended entirely on the trust a prospective voter was willing to grant him. And though Kerry struggled to separate Iraq and the war on terror, not just the imagery of the war—the descent of Iraq into a kind of terrorism that, ironically enough, seemed to confirm the President's insistence that it was in fact "the central front of the war on terror"— but Kerry's own discussion of Iraq and terrorism only seemed to bring them together.
For Kerry, this proved fatal. If Bush had succeeded in joining Iraq and terrorism and then wrestling to the very center of the election his chosen question—whom do you trust to protect you and your family from terrorism? —he had also succeeded, for too many of those famous "swing voters," in providing the answer. The exit polls make this clear: nearly six in ten voters said they trusted Bush to "handle terrorism." Nearly six in ten said they did not trust Kerry to do the same.
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Of course it is easy to say, as many have, that Kerry's policy on Iraq and terrorism was inadequate or incoherent. It is much harder to say what that policy should have been. Kerry, it is true, did not prove himself a very creative or resourceful candidate, and the Bush campaign was ruthless and brilliant in seizing on his missteps—his mention of a "global test" for United States intervention abroad, for example, and his unfortunate statement that "I actually voted for the $87 billion before I voted against it"—and using them to color in vivid tones the picture they wanted to paint of the senator.[9] Kerry gave them a good deal of help, particularly by focusing on Vietnam, and attempting to make his heroic service as a naval officer there a central part of his campaign while avoiding discussion of his more controversial leadership in the antiwar movement after he returned. The so-called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, incensed by the antiwar Kerry, did great damage to the reputation of heroic warrior Kerry, and thereby did much to bolster the point that the Bush campaign, with the help of tens of millions of dollars in television and radio ads, had sought to drive home to American voters: that Kerry was inauthentic, untrustworthy, and "unfit to lead."
But Kerry's mistakes, however costly, in fact concealed a deeper problem, which was that Democrats themselves, haunted by the traditional charge of "weakness on national security" (which of course helped lead to Kerry's nomination), were deeply divided on what should be done about the Iraq war, with as many favoring withdrawal as not.[10] This is not surprising: the war itself, a costly, tangled, unending mess, admits of no obvious solution. The war may well be President Bush's greatest wound; but for candidate Bush the ability to depict Iraq as "the central front of the war on terror" and trumpet his willingness to confront the war and "stay the course" to victory was an audacious and astonishing act of political legerdemain. He took what looked to be his greatest weakness and made it his opponent's.
Kerry might have done better to declare early on that Iraq and the war on terror could no longer be separated, and to argue, forcefully and consistently, that Bush had conducted both incompetently—so incompetently, in fact, that four more years of his leadership would put Americans at ever greater risk. But to have been convincing, such a strategy, at least implicitly, would have meant accepting the necessity of going to war in Iraq—a position that many committed Democratic voters strongly disputed and that Kerry's own past statements tended to contradict. And it would have meant demonstrating the kind of single-mindedness, relentlessness, and rigor that the Bush campaign managed but the Kerry forces never did. Either way, as long as Bush was able to succeed in melding Iraq and the war on terror and placing them firmly at the center of the campaign, Kerry faced an incumbent "war president" who, whatever his missteps, Americans would be hesitant to abandon—without a very good reason for doing so. Kerry never produced that reason.
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At about half past eight, as I stood amid the roiling sea of jubilant Democrats outside that election supervisor's office in downtown Jacksonville, I began to hear, through the civil rights songs and the laughter and cheers, a distant, booming, amplified chant. One by one people in the crowd before me heard it, and began turning to look down the street whence the chanting came, and then to look at one another. The voices grew louder and louder, and finally we saw their source: a group of twenty or so young men—they looked like football players—led by a beefy fellow holding high a blue Bush/Cheney sign, and chanting through a megaphone in a deep baritone:
Bush Won the State! Bush Won the State! Bush Won the State!
The dream of a Democratic victory had been fueled by the enormous turnout and by a handful of faulty exit polls. Everyone had believed it, even those distinctly downcast Republicans I'd visited at their Jacksonville headquarters earlier that afternoon. But the dream had ended.
The Democrats had come remarkably close. They had matched the Republicans in fund-raising dollar for dollar and had mounted an unprecedented "ground game." On election day they managed the impressive feat of bringing eight million more voters to the polls than they had four years before. But the Republicans managed to bring in eleven million additional voters. George W. Bush, having gained half a million fewer votes than Al Gore in 2000, defeated John Kerry by three million votes.[11]
Still, the victory was "narrow but clear," as William Kristol described it, with candor rare among Republicans after the election. For all the talk of "moral values," had 60,000 Ohioans made a different choice on election day, we would now be discussing the unpopularity of the Iraq war and the President's failed economic policies. After his narrow but clear victory, George W. Bush remained a popular leader promoting unpopular policies. And though he managed to convince enough Americans that Iraq was "the central front in the war on terror," the truth remains that he has saddled himself and the country he leads with a worsening, increasingly unpopular shooting war that offers no obvious means of escape.
Now he faces a newly emboldened set of claimants. Though several million more evangelical voters turned out in 2004, and thus were critical to Bush's victory, they do not seem to have formed a higher percentage of Republican voters than they had four years before.[12] Still, having accounted, in their increased numbers, for a third of Bush's margin of victory, the evangelicals unquestionably form the Republican Party's most reliable and aggressive base of supporters. Their leaders have been quick and aggressive in claiming full credit for the triumph and the press has been happy to play along. As so often in politics, the appearance, through repetition, becomes its own reality.
Leaders like the unabashedly direct Reverend Bob Jones III now demand, in the name of moral values and the political redemption they claim to have brought the President, that Bush "pass legislation defined by Biblical norms" and that he "leave an imprint of righteousness upon this nation that brings with it the blessings of Almighty God." This is a tall order, and one fraught, like the war, with considerable political peril—from moderate voters, who, for example, support outlawing "partial-birth abortion" but oppose outlawing abortion itself; and even, perhaps, from Democrats who may one day come to focus on what they have gained in this election rather than what they have lost. After all the recriminations and all the analyses of how the party must change, the fact remains that the Democrats came very close to bringing off an almost unprecedented achievement: turning out an incumbent president in a time of war. They failed, but not entirely; they now confront a narrowly reelected president, encumbered with a grim and intractable war, constrained by a huge deficit of his own creation, and faced with increasingly extreme demands that will be satisfied only at great political cost.
—December 15, 2004
Notes
[1] See The Road to Illegitimacy: One Reporter's Adventures in the 2000 Florida Vote Recount (Melville House, 2004), based on "The Road to Illegitimacy," The New York Review, February 22, 2001.
[2] In 1996 Bill Clinton, the last president to win reelection, won by 8.5 percent and 220 electoral votes; in 1964 Lyndon Johnson—who like Theodore Roosevelt had not been elected but took office after the death of an incumbent—won by 22 percent and 434 electoral votes. To find an elected incumbent who won by nearly as narrow a margin as George W. Bush, one must look back nine decades, to 1916, when Democrat Woodrow Wilson won by 3.2 percent and 23 electoral votes.
[3] Because of population gains recorded in the 2000 Census some states, like Arizona, Florida, and Georgia, were accorded more electoral votes in 2004, while others, like New York, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, were accorded fewer. This process favored the Republicans, with their base in the growing states of the South and Southwest; the same states they had won in 2000 were worth seven more votes in 2004.
[4] These figures are drawn from Michael McDonald of George Mason University and the United States Election Project. His turnout figures represent the percentage of people eligible to vote (VEP)—thus eliminating noncitizens, felons, etc.—rather than the more common, but less accurate, percentage of people of voting age (VAP). See elections.gmu.edu/voter_turnout .htm.
[5] These numbers are all drawn from The New York Times/CBS News Poll, taken in mid- to late October, with most, though not all, of the polling done between October 28 and 30.
[6] Ralph Reed, who had directed Bush's campaign in the Southeast, made this point repeatedly, explicitly comparing Bush's rhetoric on terrorism and the Middle East to Reagan's on communism. See The Charlie Rose Show, December 13, 2004.
[7] See Steven Kull et al., The Separate Reality of Bush and Kerry Supporters (PIPA/Knowledge Networks, October 21, 2004), p. 13.
[8] See Matt Bai, "Kerry's Undeclared War," New York Times Magazine, October 10, 2004.
[9] See especially "How He Did It," Newsweek, November 15, 2004, p. 70, for an excellent account of the Bush campaign's handling of the $87 billion gaffe.
[10] See, among others, Ron Brownstein, "Kerry Feels Squeeze on Iraq Policy," Los Angeles Times, May 27, 2004. As Brownstein points out, polls had shown nearly half of Democratic voters favoring immediate withdrawal, a position that, if adopted, would likely have doomed Kerry's candidacy.
[11] Half of those votes came from the President's loyal supporters in the "deep red" states—especially Texas, Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee— and a third from stronger support for Bush in the deep blue states, especially New York and New Jersey. The remainder came from the so-called purple states, and half of these from Florida—where the President, with a spectacular effort to register new voters in the outer suburbs, increased his margin from 537 to more than 370,000.
[12] Much less noticed, and in many ways more dramatic, was the upsurge in Catholics voting for Bush, which was a true shift from four years ago. Kerry, a Catholic, received 5 percent fewer Catholic votes than Al Gore, a Southern Baptist, and these votes were critical in several swing states, especially Ohio, where 55 percent of Catholic voters cast their ballots for Bush. According to Sidney Blumenthal, who reported these figures, the reason can be traced to the aggressive position that many in the Catholic hierarchy took against John Kerry. With the Catholic Church in America "in crisis," writes Blumenthal, "electing a liberal Catholic as president would have been a severe blow" to the Church and its conservative leadership. Because of this, Kerry faced aggressive opposition from many in the hierarchy, including some bishops who openly denounced the candidate and threatened to deny him communion or even to ex-communicate him. See Sidney Blumenthal, "The Lowest Ignorance Takes Charge," The Guardian, November 11, 2004.