Yesterday I tried to explain as carefully as I could why I am almost certainly voting for President Bush.
The NY Times, whose editorial board endorsed Kerry yesterday, is concerned about Kerry's Mary Cheney remark in the final debate:
- a single remark by Mr. Kerry, noting that Vice President Dick Cheney's daughter Mary is a lesbian, has shadowed his strong performance and given Republicans an opening to slow the momentum Mr. Kerry got from the debates, some Democrats say.
Amid signs of Democratic concern, Mr. Kerry's advisers acknowledged Sunday that some voters perceived Mr. Kerry's remark as an invasion of Ms. Cheney's privacy, a gratuitous personal insult, or a crass political calculation by which Mr. Kerry was trying to drive a wedge between Mr. Cheney and conservatives unaware that his daughter was gay.
And Republicans were quick to seize on the exchange to reinforce their effort to portray Mr. Kerry in these closing days of the presidential race as a man who, as Mr. Cheney put it, "will say and do anything in order to get elected."
"He shouldn't have done it," said Matthew Dowd, a senior adviser to Mr. Bush. "It was inappropriate. I just don't think you should bring up people's children in the course of a campaign. And it wasn't just accidental that he did it - he's not an accidental guy."
....as the fallout continued this weekend, some Democrats were clearly concerned, aware that there has rarely been a presidential campaign as close as this one. Three organizations released polls on Sunday showing that Mr. Bush had improved his standing. Time magazine showed him with a lead of two percentage points while Newsweek found he was ahead by four percentage points. The latest Gallup poll said Mr. Bush had a lead of eight percentage points.
Considering that most polls found that viewers judged Mr. Kerry the clear winner of all three debates, some Democrats said the most likely explanation for these results was a sharp response to the remark
....As is frequently the case in campaign episodes like this, the real damage is a function of whether they reinforce existing voter concerns about a candidate, like when Bill Clinton, at the very time he was being mocked as "Slick Willie," talked about smoking marijuana and not inhaling.
Translation: we think Kerry won the debates, we think Kerry should be president, but if he doesn't win this could very well be why. You voters, especially Bush voters, are stupid.
Another clue: on the same day the Times endorsed Kerry, yesterday, they ran a piece in their Week In Review section speculating upon what might be expected from a second Bush term:
- If the president is still Mr. Bush, would a second term be marked by pre-emption on steroids, unilateralism in a silken glove, or the kind of alliance-building Mr. Bush talked about in the three debates?
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Article comments
— go to most recent comments1 - andy marsh
Eric, I was following along pretty well until the last paragraph about the press holding both sides accountable. I think if it weren't for this relatively new technology that I'm sitting in front of right now, we would never know that Dan Rather tried to pass off fraudulent documents or that ABC has decided to critique one candidate more than the other on this particular issue of the 2 candidates distorting each others views.
I don't think the press is afraid. I think they're to biased to do the right thing!
2 - Eric Olsen
Andy, The Note is ABC News's blog of sorts and a lot of what they do is report on what the rest of the press is doing. They are just saying both campaigns are distorting and misrepresenting and that it is the duty of the press to report this and point it out when it happens, and if one side is more egregious in its distortions, the press should be willing to report that too.
3 - Mac Diva
There was never question in my mind that Eric Olsen would vote for Bush. Yet, he has not offered any convincing reason for doing so in my opinion. I think that, for him, like many voters, it comes down to maintenance of the status quo. In Olsen's America -- white, upper-middle class, suburban, no kids headed for Iraq -- things are fine. So, he sees no reason for change. If he were capable of looking beyond his own individual interest at what the entire country needs, I believe he would.
4 - Eric Olsen
My intention in writing about politics isnt' necessarily to convince anyone of anything, but to expalin myself to myself in as logical a manner as possible.
I do not think everything is fine, and I disagree with Bush on many things, which I have explained in some detail. I have been white, more or less upper-middle class, suburban all my life and I have neve before voted for a Republican for president. So it goes beyond that in my particular instance, which I have tried to explain.
I have simply tried to articulate what I believe and why.
5 - Hal Pawluk
"When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."
6 - andy marsh
so then if all you have is a screwdriver..is it just screw everything???
7 - JR
andy marsh: I think if it weren't for this relatively new technology that I'm sitting in front of right now, we would never know that Dan Rather tried to pass off fraudulent documents...
Yeah, and you would never know that the former Senate majority leader endorsed Strom Thurmond's 1948 presidential platform. And you probably still don't know that Bush passed up the opportunity to kill al-Zarqawi before the invasion of Iraq.
...or that ABC has decided to critique one candidate more than the other on this particular issue of the 2 candidates distorting each others views.
Maybe that's because one candidate is doing more of the distorting.
8 - andy marsh
maybe so...or that bill clinton was offered bin laden before 9/11...
9 - andy marsh
and you'll conviently bring up republican white trash but leave guys like robert byrd off the list...
10 - JR
maybe so...or that bill clinton was offered bin laden before 9/11...
The media covered that.
and you'll conviently bring up republican white trash but leave guys like robert byrd off the list...
Old news; predates the internet(s), in fact.
(If you want to talk about Robert Byrd, how about those empty freeways he's building all over West Virginia? Not that it's partisan issue, but it's got to deserve more coverage than it's getting.)
11 - andy marsh
so does strom...1948??? and I guess you're much more knowledgable than I am, because I didn't know the Robert Byrd was a grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan until a few years ago. But then you miss a lot of news on those 7 month deployments
12 - Jim Carruthers
Eric, if you read The NYTimes, then you must have read the Magazine article on the voodoo based presidency.
Which means if you vote for Bush, you are either a coward of the most craven sort, or deeply convinced that the public is only subservient to an oligarchy of the worst sort. Either choice is contemptible.
13 - Mac Diva
Stop exaggerating, Andy. Byrd was a member of the Klan in his youth, not an official. So were the fathers and grandfathers of many a person in the South and Midwest. (And, yes that includes participants in Blogcritics. It would be interesting to check the rolls for certain last names. ) People act as if the Klan was considered reprehensible by most white folks back then. It was not. Even less so for its less strident, but equally evil brother, the White Citizens Council. As recently as the '80s, the Klan still met regularly right outside Atlanta, and most white people there looked the other way. Many of the folks pointing out Byrd's brief membership, which he regrets, had relatives in the Klan who were not so brief and have no regrets.
Just wanted to set that straight. Feel free to return to bashing liberals in other ways.
14 - andy marsh
I've never heard him regret it...I'm not "bashing" anyone. I'm just throwing the same stuff out that gets thrown at me...
15 - Jim Carruthers
Eric, this analogy occurred to me, you're sitting in a closed garage, and you opt to keep the engine running so you can listen to the radio.
16 - Eric Olsen
I quickly read through the article - Suskind, who wrote the Paul O'Neil book, is hardly a neutral observer who was astonished to find what he found: he miraculously found what he set out to find. he was on with Chris Matthews last night and Matthews basically told him he was full of shit and that he didn't buy his premise.
I don't particularly care what Bush's sense of destiny regarding the war on terror is based upon, simply that he has that sense.
17 - andy marsh
I have read that byrd said he would never serve along side a black man...of course he didn't use that word...I also heard him say something aobut meeting white , you know the word, I've also read that he said AFTER he let his membership in the Klan laps, that the KKK was needed more than ever..but you're right, I'm exagerrating. Why is it that it's ok to get on teh case of Trent Lott for something he did in 40's but it's an exaggeration to get on the case of a member of the KKK from the 50's?
18 - Eric Olsen
Not taking any particular sides, but I heard Byrd on Terry Gross fairly recently and he flat-out stated the membership was a mistake that he regretted, that it was an outgrowth of his upbringing, that he saw the light and renounced the membership and regrets it every day. He also apologized.
19 - andy marsh
Fair enough, but my other question still stands, why are "youthful indescretions" accepted for one and not the other?
20 - Eric Olsen
I think it's a very fair point - I suppose the deciding factor is what has each done since the "youthful indiscretion"? Lott recently called the nation's failure to approve the segregationist policies of Strom Thurmond a mistake.
21 - JR
Yeah, I should have written, "(Lott) recently endorsed Strom Thurmond's 1948 presidential platform". And when he did, it was bloggers who picked up on it, not the media.
All I'm saying is that the press is perfectly willing to fall down on the job when covering either side.
22 - Mac Diva
Andy, I slept too much this weekend and got up real early this morning. (The Pacific Northwest rains have set in. Never fails to make me sleepy.) But, you are the one sounding groggy. Surely, you did not mean that Trent Lott made his remarks in the '40s? I could have sworn the famous faux paus occurred in 2002. It was what brought me into the blogosphere, since I had plenty of material about the neo-Confederate movement in my files.
And, since you are repeating every false claim about Byrd made at far Right sites, I will join Eric in defending him. Byrd has expressed regret for his brief membership in the Klan for years. He did not support the Dixiecrats. He chose not to flee the Democrats for the Republicans as part of the Southern Strategy, unlike most of his Southern peers. Byrd is a man who made a mistake and repudiated it. Lott is a man who has yet to realize he is mistaken and is still treading the path of segregationism.
Youthful indiscretion? Trent Lott is, and has been, the poster boy for the increasingly extremist Sons of Confederate Veterans for years. He is featured in their recruitment video. Other segregationist groups, including the League of the South and the Council of Conservative Citizens have used his influence (and John Ashworth's) to their advantage. You could not have chosen someone more representative of the neo-Confederate influence on American politics if you had tried.
23 - andy marsh
If you read all my comments on this thread diva, you'll see that I did call him white trash.
My point is, that democrats can get away with the same stuff that republicans get attacked for. Robert Byrd using the "n" word regardless of whether he put white in front of it was wrong, but no one attacked him. I guess it's ok for a crazy old white boy to use that word, as long as it's in context. I heard Byrd say that on Fox Sunday, so it's not something I'm picking up from a web site.
24 - Jim Carruthers
I've been gob-smacked a couple of times this week, first this article by Eric, then by Ed Koch on The Daily Show, then on The National on CBC last night with a piece on voters in Las Vegas voting for terror. Remember terror is a state of mind, it is not a country or organization.
So, why is it that otherwise seemingly sane people who bear the brunt of mis-management and shenanigans, as soon as you say the trigger word, "war on terra" start saying: George W. Bush is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life.
I must say I'm very, very disappointed with you if you vote for Bush out of fear. Here's a white feather, wear it with shame.
25 - Eric Olsen
Jim, I appreciate your concern and am flattered to have so disappointed you. But I don't see it as voting for fear at all, quite the opposite, I see it as voting for a pro-active approach to the very real problem of terror and the world that generates it. I am voting offensively (pun intended)