I don't see how anyone who cares about the republic can vote for Bush. Yeah, Kerry's a non-entity, but maybe if we have a divided gov't the Republicans will get over their idea that the authority to set aside laws is "inherent in the president."

If that notion gets accepted then we'll have lost our freedoms, no matter how small our gov't becomes.

Oh yeah Carl, we are SO much less free today than a year ago, a decade ago, a century ago, a millenium ago. Ugh.

I'm no Kerry guy but would not advise writing him off at this point. Sure, his rhetorical style, while articulate, is obtuse and his ideas do suffer from a certain staleness, but Bush is failing to communicate a clear, articulate message.

In order for Bush to gain from Kerry's weaknesses he must exploit them. I see no indication that he is doing so. Maybe he'll bring out the big guns this summer and fall - maybe it will be too late.

For example, the economy has added roughly 1.2 million jobs in the last six months or so, yet a poll released yesterday shows that 67% of Americans believe the economy has lost jobs in the last six months. That is a Kerry communication success and a Bush communication failure. Should that continue Kerry, as somnambulate as he may be, could carry the day.

“For example, the economy has added roughly 1.2 million jobs in the last six months or so, yet a poll released yesterday shows that 67% of Americans believe the economy has lost jobs in the last six months. That is a Kerry communication success and a Bush communication failure.”

No, this is “communication success” is due to the biased liberal media. They have repeatedly slanted stories to help the democrats. One of their techniques is the “personal interest” story. The liberal journalist can write about some particular person who claims to have lost their job due to outsourcing. This type of story influences people far more than those containing hard data. Bill Clinton never had to endure such nonsense while running for reelection. The emphasis at that time was on the glass being half full and not half empty.

I’ve long claimed that a Republican candidate for President usually starts off with a 5 point deficit. The liberal media will do just about anything to defeat a Republican. I also don’t mind when some folks criticize President Bush for increasing the deficit. This is a very fair accusations. However, a supporter for either Ralph Nader or John Kerry is obligated to keep their mouths shut. Both these candidates want to spend a hell of a lot more money!

And let's remember that the problems faced by Mr. Reagan and Mr. Bush are rather different.

And BTW; I care about the Republic, and therefore the very LAST thing I would ever do is vote for Kerry.

Boortz the other morning brings up a parallel to my thoughts about the Reagan funeral, last week:

" Last week we honored a president, a Republican, who earned and deserves the credit for ending the Cold War. Ronald Reagan also reinvigorated capitalism in America, creating a growing economy that still affects us all. So ... this question. Since JFK, what have Democrats had to offer that could match the performance of Ronald Reagan? Carter? Clinton? Go ahead, tell me what they accomplished. And don't give me this nonsense about the economy under Clinton. The economy was improving when Clinton took office, and was on its way down when he left. I'm waiting."

And that's it, then, isn't it... it's as I said;

When people remember the greatness of Ronald Reagan, will they also remember what John Kerry was doing during Reagan's eight years in the White House... That is, doggedly opposing Mr. Reagan every step of the way... Opposing actions Kerry now disingenuously praises Reagan for?

Now that we've had a week or so of remembering what real leadership is, and we've had some time to reflect who is closer to those ideals of leadership, the Democrats are going to be spending a great deal of time trying to tear down Mr. Reagan's legacy, so as to deny the use of that legacy to Mr. Bush. As I've already said in this space, and mark this well; Mr. Reagan's legacy will loom large in the coming election run-up.

Which means that Kerry and company will have to go negative, bigtime, not only on Mr. Bush, but on Mr. Reagan as well.

Granted, this is crass, perhaps, but the Reagan legacy is the elephant in the room we now deal with, like it or not.

Matter of fact, I suggest Kerry can only win now, if he manages to separate Mr. Bush from Mr. Reagan's legacy, either by a direct separation, or be the discrediting of Reagan. Postrel's comments are on or nrea the leading edge of that headlong charge.

But, If Kerry tries to separate Mr. Bush from Mr. Reagan's legacy by means of saying Mr. Bush falls short of Mr Reagan, he's in effect lauding Reagan's policies.... policies he's on record all through the Reagan years of working against.
Kinda hard for him to defend such a position.

On the other hand given the obvious feeling about Mr. Reagan, (And who, watching last week can deny this?) ...it will not do to try and denigrate Mr. Reagan's legacy in his attempt to deny Mr. Bush's identification of himself as being the heir of it.

The question becomes, in either event, how much of that negativity the American people are going to stand for after a week of being reminded what it's like with a real leader at the helm. The answer, obviously, is "not much, if any".

And that, I think is the defining question of this campaign at the moment, and going forward, too, unless Kerry and his people can find some other issue to latch onto. What else, after all, do they have to go on? The negative busienss ins't going to work. Without any changes in the lay of the land, Kerry is trapped, having far more in the way of problems to get through to get elected than does Mr. Bush.

Certainly the economy is off the table given the booming economic numbers... The task of course is getting those numbers past the liberal press who is seemingly reluctant to post those massive economic gains. I suspect that the republicans will gain the upper hand on that sub-plot by election day.

Afghanistan is pretty much dealt with, and is certainly on the right track.. and our relations with them are quite good; Mr Bush meeting with Afghan President Hamid Karzai the other day seems a good example. Kerry will not be able to use Afghanistan as a wedge issue. It's off the table.

We're in for a spot of nastiness in Iraq over the next two weeks as we move up to Iraqi sovereignty, as the Islamofacists try to tip the scales in their favor. But I don't know of anyone who didn't expect them to try something... and once that settles down, Mr. Bush looks very good indeed going into the election.... so Iraq is off the table as well as an election issue.

All Kerry will have left to run on is negativity and hate. And even he's not stupid enough to think that's going to gain him the election.

David,
Even if what you are saying is true, and I believe it is, Bush still must be faulted for a lack of aggression in getting his message out and understood.

I agree that the starting line for Republicans is further back than Democrats because of Liberal media bias, but that is not new news. I can't help but wonder why Bush and his campaign genius Karl Rove have let this go on for so long. Could it be a tortoise and hare tactic? Are they counting on the electorate to be inattentive and undecided until after the Conventions and Labor day? Seems to me that remaining silent now is a high risk strategy especially given that the cost of communicating, for a sitting President no less, is so low.

Why is no on addressing the fact that Kerry has refused to give up his Senate seat even though he's hardly ever in DC and has missed some important votes. I bet when he was running for the Senate he made lots of promises to voters about how he would work on their behalf. He seems to have forgotten them now.

I believe that Al Gore was ahead at this point in the 2000 election by about 15 points. The Democratic primary ended smoothly with Bradley quickly endorsing Gore and promising to work closely to assist in electing Al Gore.

Bush was still in the midst of an ugly primary with McCain, yet he made up a double digit deficit to defeat Al Gore in November.

If you think Rove is asleep at the wheel then you're obviously don't know Karl Rove. Getting jazzed about Kerry isn't going to bring em out the polls like it will for President Bush. I've yet to meet a fervent supporter of Kerry, just an explicit hater of President Bush.

I will provide a quick example of how the major media slant the economic news. These journalist hint that the unemployment numbers are actually much higher than reported. They don’t offer any hard data to contradict these numbers. Instead, they write a personal interest story about someobody who has been out of work for a long time---and has given up the search. The key here is the emphasis on the unemployed individual abandoning hope. This allows the sleaze bag reporter to hint that the unemployemnt numbers miss a lot of out of work Americans.

No one who truly cares about the republic would elect a man who has a) received the free ride this man has (the easiest nightly news coverage in at least 16 years) and b) because they hate the other guy. That's not reason enough.

Dress it up how you want, Kerry is still running as a populist. When was the last time that worked? Imo if Kerry was running as a New Democrat right now he'd have a nice lead. What can his arguments be? The deficit is too big but he wants to add a bunch of social programs and a huge healthcare program? The economy is god awful when it clearly isnt? Outsourcing is evil but rising consumer prices are evil too? Oh, and he's going to raise taxes. Not appealing.
Kerry, if he were wise, would be running purely on a platform of getting spending under control, reforming entitlements responsibly, and being pro-business/pro-trade. Thats how he is still trying to portray himself, but his proposals do the opposite. Americans can spot BSers better than anybody. Sometimes they are willing to live with it, sometimes not.

This seems to have turned in an alternate-universe right-wing propaganda thread.

Sorry, I really don't have time to deconstruct all the lies you have managed to assemble over the course of just a few hours, but let's just take one blatant absurdity that Brennan Stout claimed:

I believe that Al Gore was ahead at this point in the 2000 election by about 15 points.

In fact, Bush was ahead by 4 points in June 2000, according to this ABC poll:

http://abcnews.go.com/sections/politics/DailyNews/poll000612.html

Oh, and this:

Bush was still in the midst of an ugly primary with McCain, yet he made up a double digit deficit to defeat Al Gore in November.

McCain withdrew on March 7th, 2000. And the only ugly thing about the Republican primary was how the Bush team attacked McCain's record with lies and distortions.

Ok, one more. David Thomson:

This allows the sleaze bag reporter to hint that the unemployemnt numbers miss a lot of out of work Americans.

Well, they do, so I guess you are the sleaze bag for claiming otherwise. The BLS publishes several different measures of unemployment called U-1 through U-6. The one that is generally reported in the press is U-3: "Total unemployed, as a percent of the civilian labor force (official unemployment rate)".

Whereas U-6 is defined as: "Total unemployed, plus all marginally attached workers, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all marginally attached workers". In May 2004 U-3 was at 5.6 %, while U-6 stood at 9.7 %. (At the end of 2000, U-3 was at 3.9 %, while U-6 was at 6.9 % - so the two rates have increased about the same, proportionally.)

U-6 was just as high at roughly the same point during the Clinton recovery (in fact, exactly as high in May 1996 as in May 2004).

As I have pointed out before, the critical difference between the two economic recoveries is that Clinton managed to pull the economy out of a recession without budget-busting tax cuts. He actually raised taxes a bit, and yet the economy was doing just fine, the budget was balanced, and everybody was happy - except for disgruntled right-wingers, of course.

So how often do the liberal media point this out when they dutifully report job creation numbers? Not nearly often enough, if you ask me!

HH: The May 26th Field Poll of California voters. Kerry only draws 33% support in favor of him. The other 67% comes from votes against President Bush. Bush on the other hand draws 71% support and only 29% vote against John Kerry.

Kerry leads in the overall poll, but that's a huge number of 'ABB' votes that easily could be diverted away from Kerry to either Nader or to no one, a discouraged vote that never shows up. In 2000 California was easily won by Al Gore, but support for Gore was strong and not votes against Bush. Polls showed that Gore found wild support among California voters and the lackthereof for Kerry presents a big obstacle for Democrats that have to win California. In fact, they need to win without spending a lot a resources.

Wow, go gw. I didn't even know where to start with these lies. The AEI report examines a purposefully misleading, indeed silly, statistical proxy. See deLong for the deconstruction of that lie. NO! It is not simply spin, it is purposeful misrepresentation. It is a lie. If I had tried to misrepresent facts like this to my "Republican" father and then claim I had never lied, just spun the truth, I would never have survived childhood. Where are these children's parents?

One last point. At least some of Reagans cuts were not cuts in government but shifts toward local provision and payment. That may well have been the right thing to do, I don't really know. The usefulness of this devolution probably varies across government services. But that wasn't shrinking government, only shifting it around a bit. So the fact that federal government outlays decreased by something like 0.9% or GDP during his 8 years in office needs to be considered in light of offsetting and increased state and local spending that Reagan advocated.

try brad delong for a good smackdown of this data.

Brennan Stout: The May 26th Field Poll of California voters.

Which overall sounds very similar to the June 20, 2000 Field Poll of California voters: http://field.com/fieldpollonline/subscribers/Release1963.pdf

Kerry only draws 33% support in favor of him. The other 67% comes from votes against President Bush. Bush on the other hand draws 71% support and only 29% vote against John Kerry.

Wow, nicely spun. You conveniently ignore that Kerry has a 48-40 favorable rating vs. 44-53 for Bush (i.e. 53 % unfavorable). Then you ignore that the question from which you derive the "33 % support" lie was:

"Is your preference more a vote for (George W. Bush) (John Kerry) or more a vote against (John Kerry) (George W. Bush)?"

The critical word being "more". Just because they hate Bush more than they like Kerry doesn't mean they don't like or support Kerry! It just shows how much Bush has antagonized a lot of California voters.

In 2000 California was easily won by Al Gore, but support for Gore was strong and not votes against Bush.

First, let's not forget how the Republicans in 2000 claimed until up to Election Day that California might be in play.

Second, nobody asked the question in 2000 whether people voted more for Gore or more against Bush.

It's actually an interesting phenomenon how the so-called liberal media has managed to spread the meme that it's cool to not be for Kerry, but just against Bush, that it's so cool to lament that Kerry is uninspiring and everybody just wished the Democrats had nominated someone else. Of course, if you ask the very same people what they think of Howard Dean, they will start telling you about how divisive and unelectable Dean is...

Mark Buehner: Dress it up how you want, Kerry is still running as a populist. When was the last time that worked?

Uh, perhaps four years ago, in 2000?

"By far the vast majority of my tax cuts go to the bottom end of the spectrum."

A populist statement - buying votes with tax cuts. Too bad it was also a blatant lie.

Any serious comparison of Bush and Reagan would also have to take into account what members of the current administration thought of Reagan and his policies at the time.

There was a stunning op-ed in the New York Times a few days ago - I already posted excerpts from it on another thread, but conveniently nobody responded. Here is the link again, together with the key quote from the article: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/11/opinion/11DIGG.html

Mr. Reagan rejected the neocons; George W. Bush stands by them no matter what.

And then there's the Bush campaign's portraying Kerry as "weak on defense" because he voted against some of Reagan's defense budgets. David Thomson turned that into accusing Kerry of "appeasing" the Soviet Union. Well, another appeaser is currently our Vice President then:

http://www.misleader.org/daily_mislead/Read.asp?fn=df06082004.html

Cheney said at the height of the Cold War that if Reagan "doesn't really cut defense, he becomes the No. 1 special pleader in town." Cheney urged Reagan to cut defense spending, saying, "the president has to reach out and take a whack at everything to be credible," and told the White House that "you've got to hit defense".

GW: Dick Cheney also criticized Israel for bombing the Osirak reactor in western Iraq . Several years later he openly express gratitude for Israel's forward thinking.

BTW, what do you do for a living? Do you work in politics?

Just a note on Reagan's budgets, from someone who was there at the time: in his first term, and especially in his first year or two in office, Reagan's proposed cuts in discretionary spending were very serious matters indeed, because there was real support for them in Congress and also because they had a powerful, articulate advocate in OMB Director David Stockman. During the balance of his time in office Reagan's administration would often propose very similar cuts without anyone taking them seriously, and after Stockman resigned in 1985 the administration didn't defend its proposals with that much enthusiasm either.

Moreover Reagan made serious proposals early in his administration to trim entitlement spending, and Stockman's office planned more (the "magic asterisk" episode) to make up the shortfall in revenues he saw coming as early as 1981. These proposals ended around 1982 after encountering violent opposition from Democrats in Congress. Finally the administration also proposed changes in agriculture policy in 1983 and especially in 1985 that would have substantially reduced spending in that area (note that most of this spending technically falls into the entitlement rather than the discretionary category. Because of the way farm programs work the impact of various proposals to change them cannot be more than roughly estimated at the time they are made). Congress rejected most administration proposals in this area.

An obvious factor here was that Reagan faced a Democratic House throughout his tenure in the White House. His popularity and the Republican Senate (through 1986) allowed him to block most proposals to increase spending, but the stalemate on eliminating specific programs was a fact of life in Washington for part of his first and all of his second term.

Clinton's political situation was very different, but until the last years of his administration led to a similar result. Forced by concern over the deficit to limit spending proposals (and drop the 1992 campaign idea of the middle class tax cut) when he had a Democratic Congress in his first two years, Clinton then faced a Republican Congress determined to succeed where Reagan had failed. The pracical result was a continuation of the fiscal policy stalemate -- a few new programs were begun, often after acrimonious fights in Congress, but even fewer were eliminated. As the 1990s boom gathered steam both the Clinton administration and Republicans in Congress grew progressively less concerned about rising government spending, with predictable results.

FWIW, one obvious possibility for the first years of a Kerry administration is a reversion to the pattern of the late 1980s and early 1990s, with both White House and Congress content to squeeze discretionary spending through across-the-board restrictions while avoiding more politically painful elimination of programs. The Medicare situation will mean that unlike in the earlier period restrictions on domestic discretionary spending and even cuts in defense will not be enough to keep the deficit from remaining at a very high level.

Deborah Orin, Washington Bureau Chief of the New York Post, has a must-read column in today’s edition, titled Reporting for the Enemy. You can read it on my">http://allthingspolitical.blogspot.com/2004/06/reporting-for-enemy.html"> Blog, where I have posted it along with a link to the original article.
For links to news, views, politics, and government, bookmark All Things Political.

Oh yeah Carl, we are SO much less free today than a year ago, a decade ago, a century ago, a millenium ago. Ugh. -- steve

If you don't understand that the republic is in danger, then you haven't been paying attention -- or you don't understand the principles this country was founded on. Here's an argument the Bush administration recently made before the Supreme Court:

...I think the fact that executive discretion in a war situation can be abused [by allowing mild torture] is not a good and sufficient reason for judicial micromanagement in overseeing that authority. You have to recognize that in situations where there is a war, where the government is on a war footing, that you have to trust the executive.

Since Bush has said we'll probably be on a war footing for the rest of our lives, that gives the executive branch a blank check for the foreseeable future, including imprisoning citizens on the president's word alone. Even if you trust Bush with this power, would you trust Hillary Clinton with it? I don't think so.

"It would be a dangerous delusion were a confidence in the men of our choice to silence our fears for the safety of our rights.... [C]onfidence is everywhere the parent of despotism; free government is founded in jealousy and not in confidence; it is jealousy, and not confidence which prescribes limited constitutions to bind down those whom we are obliged to trust with power; that our Constitution has accordingly fixed the limits to which, and no farther, our confidence may go.... In questions of power, then, let no more be said of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution."

--Thomas Jefferson, Kentucky Resolution, 1798

If you don't understand that the republic is in danger, then you haven't been paying attention -- or you don't understand the principles this country was founded on. Here's an argument the Bush administration recently made before the Supreme Court:

The argument is a correct one... and one you'd be making if Bill Clinton was still in the WH.

"The argument is a correct one... and one you'd be making if Bill Clinton was still in the WH." -- Bithead

How little you know me -- or the Constitution -- Bithead. I hate Clinton for taking advantage of the Oklahoma City bombing to pass his own version of the Patriot Act. As far as I'm concerned, the Dems are no better than the Repubs when it comes to civil liberties. I do think, however, that the Republican Congress would do a better job of oversight if the president was a Democrat.

As for the argument being a correct one, it goes against 700 years of Anglo-American jurisprudence, as the Washington Times recently observed.

How little you know me --

And why, pray you, might that be? On what, save your words posted here, might I be making such judgements?

"....or the Constitution "

The constitution involves citizens.
The people in question are not, being, rather sworn enemies, who would, given the chance use our laws against us to our defeat.

I hate Clinton for taking advantage of the Oklahoma City bombing to pass his own version of the Patriot Act. As far as I'm concerned, the Dems are no better than the Repubs when it comes to civil liberties

It's time we started understanding that our civil liberty stands in more danger from such as you defend in the name of civil liberty, than it does from either Clinton OR Bush. Mind, I am one who thinks Clinton should be smelling up a jail cell at the moment, for his inaction as regards Islamic terrorism, if nothing else.

Escaped out too soon, sorry.

As for the argument being a correct one, it goes against 700 years of Anglo-American jurisprudence

At what point during that 700 year history has any Anglo-American force been faced with such an enemy?