Second Debate Thoughts

Though my own feeling was that it was a tie, a lot of my loyal Republican friends called in concessions of defeat midway through the debate. I think seeing Bush perform twice as well as he did last time tainted my own view of the debate in is favor though. There wasn’t a single blank stare that lasted longer than two seconds or an “umm” during the entire program. Bush stayed off the defensive and both candidates stayed viciously in attack mode.

Kerry wasn’t bad, but he wasn’t as stylistically good as he was during the first debate. I feel the public responds more to how well a candidate handles himself on stage than the strength of arguments when judging debates. Few can subjectively judge the arguments of the debate because most of us have logically arrived at our own beliefs and any intelligent argument for said beliefs speaks to us and any argument against seems to miss the point. Furthermore, a candidate’s style can be more objectively measured and most people who aren’t political junkies respond more to style in the polls.

Kerry didn’t seem to feel as constrained by time, so his answers tended to feel more like speeches. He did, however, hit quite a few home runs. I think his answer to the flip flop accusation in the beginning was dead on and will affect viewers – he itemized the allegations, rebutted them quickly, and then turned it into an attack on Bush by effectively pointing out that Bush was using it to deflect attention away from his own performance failures, particularly with jobs and the economy.

One of my biggest pet peeves about this and the veep debate is the inability of Kerry/edwards to truthfully answer why they voted against the $87 billion or to anwer why they've missed so many votes this year. They voted against the $87 billion with most democrats largely because they felt that the majority of reconstruction costs should be supported by future Iraqi oil revnues, not the American tax payers wallet. They voted against the $87 billion "before they voted against it" as a legislative tool to stop the bill from passing the way it was written so it could be amended. Kerry and Edwards played it off like they were always against spending that money because they didn't think Bush had a plan for winning in Iraq - which actually plays right into Republicans hands when the answer like that. It would also take just one sentence to show how hollow Bush/Cheney arguments are and explain why they missed so many votes this year. Everyone, including Bush and Cheney, have been criss-crossing the country on a daily basis sentence the begining of the campaign season - but Kerry, unlike Bush, doesn't have an airborne office (Air Force 1) to fly around in on taxpayer dollars. You're either in DC to make your vote or your not... Bush doesn't have to cast any votes and he can sign bills anywhere.

On a lighter note, we turned the debates into a party complete with a debate drinking came. Every time Bush said “my opponent” (he refuses to address Kerry by name), we would take a shot of cheap Canadian Mist whiskey. Ten minutes into the debate we realized we’d be in the hospital with alcohol poisoning if it kept that pace up for over an hour.

Debate Summary

From the very beginning of the campaign Kerry needed to get Bush on the defensive. It just wasn’t happening. In early polling over the summer, all the leads Kerry had were directly related to Bush’s incredibly low job performance numbers related to the economy and the faltering security in Iraq – including the loss of Fallujah to the insurgents.

Conservatives, however, delivered a near-fatal blow to Kerry after the convention. Following Karl Rove’s rule that you attack your enemy where he is strongest, not where he is weakest Swiftboat Veteran’s for Truth put out ad’s questioning the validity of Kerry’s war record. This effectively nulled Kerry’s acclaimed first-hand understanding of how foreign policy works and liberals claims that Bush got preferential treatment by being placed in the Texas Air National Guard. “Stop talking about Vietnam,” was Clinton’s final advice on the matter.

This coupled with claims of being a “flip flopper” left Kerry on the defensive during the past month. After the Republican convention, when Bush was able to get out his message while Kerry was still on the defensive, Bush saw a considerable bounce – both his numbers went up among undecided’s and Kerry’s numbers fell.

The first debate put an end to that. Simply put, Kerry was at his absolute best and Bush was at nearly his worst. Kerry spoke eloquently, forcefully, and yet did this without the normal verbosity campaign observers are used to. In fact, he never went over his time limit. Bush, on the other hand, stammered and stumbled his way though the debate. When Kerry spoke, Bush made childish faces. Kerry often just leaned slightly with a coy smile and watched Bush stumble around. Bush filled every sentence with “umm”, blank spaces, and at least one blank stare after a question that lasted nearly five seconds. He also snapped on the Jim Lehrer, “Let me finish!” when his time ran out because of too much white space (and gray, I suppose) between his words.

Most important, it seemed like Kerry finally had Bush on the defensive. Bush’s only real criticism of Kerry was the persistent flip-flopper accusation and claiming that that the junior Senator didn’t know how world politics really worked. Kerry didn’t defend himself against the flip-flopper accusation until nearly an hour into the debate - close enough towards the end so that viewers would remember it more clearly. More often than not, he would spend a few short words rebutting before launching into Bush again. Bush, however, was obviously irked and spent what seemed like most of his time defending his foreign policy decisions.

As I see it, the election comes down like this: Kerry doesn’t have enough personnel charm or a strong enough record to win the election as a referendum on his own strengths. The only way that he can win is by making the election about Bush, a referendum on the Presidents record. Bush’s job-approval ratings have been low enough to make that a viable winning strategy for Kerry. In defense, the Bush campaign team has attacked Kerry to make him out to be an even less viable option than the sitting President – a man without a moral background or the political consistency to lead the nation through troubled times. As such, Bush wants to make this election about Kerry. If Kerry can keep Bush on the defensive and effortlessly and effectively gloss over his own shortcomings as he did during the debate, it looks like the election will be his to lose.

Wag The Dog

On August 7^th, 1998 as my father was boarding a plane to fly out of N’Djamena, the capital of Chad, two car bombs blew apart the embassies of two other central African nations – Kenya and Tanzania. This was an opening salvo in the Terror Wars. President Clinton responded by unloading 70 Tomahawk cruise missiles into bin Laden’s training camps in Afghanistan and 13 missiles a suspected chemical weapons factory in Sudan.

Republicans complain today that this use of force was too feeble to be effective – bin Laden was left alive (he faked his location by using phones he knew were tapped and escaped). This wasn’t the criticism leveled at the time though. Back then it was that Clinton was merely “waging the dog,” as the term for using military force to get headlines in times of presidential trouble came to be known. A Republican Senator from Indiana, Dan Coats, was heard to say that the decision to strike was “made because it was necessary to save the president's job and distract attention away" from the perpetually spun Lewinsky scandal. It begs the question if the Lewinsky scandal was meant save the “Republican Revolution” and distract attention away from the real issues – like a growing terrorism specter.

Today, however, I feel we can more confidently say that it is this president who is “wagging the dog.” It’s always been a creeping suspicion of mine that the White House has been using terror threat alerts to keep an unnecessary and endless war-mentality that protects his job. There have been too many coincidences of late, though, to show that the President is using his position to keep unflattering news out of the headlines.

In the days after the Democratic Convention, the White House began talking of new and specific terrorist threats to against five financial institutions in the mid-Atlantic seaboard. The newspaper began reporting less on the anticipated bounce for Kerry and instead state focused on the security preparations around DC and New York. We then had the pleasure of learning that this was based on intelligence gathered prior to 9/11.

That was just the first obvious time. On the night of the debates, we learned that the US military was gathering tens of thousands of US troops outside of Summara, one of the “no-go” areas for the occupation forces. They proceeded to launch a three day assault that robbed headlines of the Kerry debate victory. It’s not that I don’t feel this attack was justified, but the timing is suspicious at best – sinister at worse. This wasn’t a random firefight, but a well planned and timed offensive. The timing couldn’t have been better for Bush if his staff had planned it – wait, the Presidents’ appointee’s do run the Pentagon who planned this…

Interview With Ray McGovern

Ray McGovern, a retired CIA analyst of 27 years, came to UNF on the September 22 to condemn what he saw as a massive failure of the US intelligence system of late. “They prostituted the intelligence process. Intelligence is supposed to be about telling it like it is without fear of favor.” Ray McGovern comes across as just a disgruntled former employee at first, but with time you begin to feel his passion and respect for his careers work. He says he looks back at his work as important and “at its best, lifesaving.” But he seems pissed. Slightly uncomfortable amongst the local Wage Peace activists who were hosting a dinner in his honor, he doesn’t fit the profile of your average anti-war activist. His anger was more personal than a general dislike of the President and his policies. Though clearly critical of the war, his anger is really over the black eye he says Bush gave the CIA to cover for the real reasons for war and his belief that the US intelligence system has become too tied into the Beltway political scene, thereby creating a credibility gap in what it reports.

“It all started with William Casey, Reagan’s CIA Director,” McGovern says. “There’s a Soviet under every rock!’ When there was an assassination attempt on the Pope and everyone was saying it was just a lone nut, Casey had a special committee set up, staffed with people more concerned with their careers than with truth, to tell him the answer he wanted: that the Soviets were involved. Those are the same guys who run the CIA today.”

Dr. Ted Stumm, Chairman of UNF’s Political Science Department, had a different opinion. “It happens everywhere, we even teach a course on how to do it in the Public Admin grad program. We teach them how to advance their careers, but also to follow the rules. I don’t doubt that it happens in the intelligence community too.” Stumm is a retired Air Force Colonel who once served as chief military negotiator in Turkey and base commander at Polk Air Force Base. He seems skeptical that the information was tainted by this though. There is never any one truth in intelligence assessments, he says, but rather that CIA leadership makes informed assessments on all the information given.

On the issue of the 9/11 Commission’s reported findings, Stumm and McGovern have widely different beliefs. “Independent?” McGovern began, “It was appointed by the President and they were almost all politicians and lawyers. There were no intelligence professionals there; its main objective from the beginning was to cover two of Bush’s mistakes: what he did before Sept 11, and what he did in response.” When asked to clarify, “They said it was an institutional failure - everyone was to blame - which means no one is to blame. They didn’t want to point fingers, but what the hell is an independent commission supposed to be doing?”

Stumm felt it was easy to level the criticism McGovern had after the fact. “I don’t know that there was an intelligence failure. Commissions always have the benefit of hindsight, something that didn’t exist on September 10th. What the intelligence said before 9/11 was the same thing before Pearl Harbor, ‘we have something cooking, but we don’t know when or where.’ There were 3000 planes in the skies over America when the attacks happened, even if you knew the date and time – how are you going to pick which 4 or 5 of them are the ones to be hijacked?”

“Douglas McArthur said that 95 percent of the intelligence he received as commander is useless,” Stumm continued. “It’s up to the commander to find out that 5 percent that’s important. Sometimes even McArthur picks the wrong 5 percent,” he said, referring to Macarthur’s conviction the Chinese would not fight in the Korean War. “Intelligence is always an incomplete picture; it’s more an art than a science.”

“There were so many warnings,” McGovern said. “Had anybody been doing half their jobs right – had Bush not been on vacation, had the FAA acted on the information that a hijacked plane just smashed into one of the twin towers and there were probably more hijacked airliners in the sky – a lot of this wouldn’t have happened as it did.”