W and the evil Wead

President Bush is heard on an audio tape acknowledging in a private conversation with (advisor to former President Bush) Doug Wead that he used marijuana but wouldn't admit it publicly for fear that a child would imitate his errors. Preliminary quotes are at Political Gateway. According to that site, Bush said:

"I woudn't answer the marijuana questions. You know why? Because I don't want some little kid doing what I tried."

I see nothing in context here that is particularly troublesome for Bush, given the certainty of the drunk driving arrest, and the possibility of cocaine use... neither of which have proven especially problematic for Bush, politically, although the timing of the release of the drunk driving charge (by a Dem operative) surely helped make the 2000 election dangerously close.

A point frequently missed by the left (when charges like these are surfaced by hopeful Bush-bashers) is that the religous right believes in forgiveness, in the presence of obvious repentance. That doesn't mean that private sins must be publicly confessed in detail... thank God.

No one will be surprised that Bush smoked weed sometime, or that he chooses not to answer direct questions about it now. Is this a big revelation?

The tape transcripts I've seen so far reveal what we knew already.... that Bush is a man with ideals, who has practical perspectives on how to pursue them. Bush is tough and means what he says. He gets to the point. In other words, his current *public image* seems to fit the *private image* shown on the tapes.

In the meantime... I wonder if Doug Wead did weed? Sorry... couldn't resist.

The Bear Dances and Sings

CNN and FOX are covering the election in Iraq.

I can only stand in awe of the courage of these determined voters. Their sheer guts and commitment to show up at all should be a lesson to nay-sayers everywhere about what people in this part of the world really want. How many voters would show up in, say, Chicago, in a similar situation? I don't know... but these Iraqi voters deserve our very highest respect.

CNN's current online headline is "Iraqis vote amid scattered attacks". Roughly half the TV coverage from CNN seems to be about the attacks today, but a solid half is about the vote itself.

FOX's headline is "Iraq's Historic Vote Begins". The first paragragh tells of attacks, but also provides context: lots of voters, and many foiled attacks, as well as some successful ones. FOX's TV coverage is stressing the protection provided by Iraqi forces, police and military, directly around the polling places. FOX has shown many entire families, from elderly to young children (presumably not voting yet...), walking together to polling places... in some cases carrying Iraqi flags, showing thumbs up to the camera, etc.

Both cable networks have provided reasonable coverage on how many Iraqi women are voting, although it seems to have been inadvertent in one CNN report, where the reporter could not be heard over all the women talking in the polling place.

ABCNEWS is carrying a story stressing the attacks, predicting lack of Sunni turnout, stressing how bad the result of a low Sunni turnout will be, etc. Big shock. Little mention of who is providing the election security... mostly Iraqis around the polling places. All attacks listed in GREAT detail.

Another ABC article, IRAQI HISTORY MAY COLOR VIEWS OF ELECTION tries to downplay the importance of a successful election. I consider this to be evidence that the election must be going well in the eyes of the editors.

Rauch's Arithmetic

Hugh Hewitt has now posted the full text of Jonathon Rauch's article in Atlantic Monthly on the divisions in American political and social life. He's also posted Mr. Rauch's confession that some of his language in associating religious conservatism with violent behavior was, uh, intemporate. Kudo's to Mr. Rauch for admitting that, and doing so quickly.

I don't think his sorta mea culpa is adequate to explain his presentation, however, and in the quote below, I think he digs his hole a little deeper.

Mr. Rauch's article attempts to make the point that America is less divided than it seems, and that the two main political parties are more centrist than they seem at times, while remaining capable of absorbing those with more extreme views at election time.

Mr. Rauch makes some interesting points. Much of his position seems to be based on simply using different polls than are used by those who assert the deep division hypothesis, and by interpreting some of the same polls from a different perspective. Some of his points come from "focus group" studies that he thinks are superior to polls, at least some of the time. As always, what passes for the peculiar art of "qualitative research" is up for grabs... but Mr. Rauch seems to me to be cherry picking the data that fits his notion.

Everyone knows that polls are virtually never done in an ideological vacuum. With any polling question, it is possible to make some good guesses about assumptions that underly the question that the pollster is ostensibly asking. The biggest weaknesses of polls are that they have poor mechanisms for measuring how *strongly* a participant feels about an issue, and polls usually make little attempt to measure what a participant actually knows about the issue before eliciting an opinion.

Similarly, who ran the focus groups? What was their orientation politically/socially? Were two sets of focus groups run in parallel on the same topics, by people of oppositie perspectives? Were contrasting results tossed out? As a university professor who is exposed to all sorts of things that are called "research", I remain skeptical about all of the above.

It is possible, however, to infer some things from the polls that really matter, the elections, and from some pieces of data that no one disputes on either side of the political fence.

1) African-Americans vote overwhelmingly Democratic, regardless of what individual answers they give on single topic polls. So do certain other ethnic groups, though the divide may be smaller.

2) Church goers (and those who identify strongly with religious traditions, even when their participation isn't perfect) vote two-to-one for Republicans.

3) The reverse (two-to-one non-church goers for Democrats) is also approximately correct.


Mr. Rauch says:

"The Republican Party has acquired its distinctively tart right-wing flavor largely because it has absorbed (in fact, to a significant extent has organizationally merged with) the religious right. As Hanna Rosin reports elsewhere in this package [elsewhere in the same Atlantic Monthly issue], religious conservatives are becoming more uniformly Republican even as their faiths and backgrounds grow more diverse."

Mr. Rauch seems to be trying to have it two ways. On the one hand, he wants to identify the "religious right" as occupying an "extremist" position in the Republican party, somewhat analogous to what he wants us to think of leftists like Michael Moore in the Democratic party. (This seems to exclude members of the religious right from consideration as "centrists", or, as Hugh likes to say, members of the "center right".) On the other hand, he seems to undercut his own position (fatally, I think) by acknowledging that what he calls the "religious right" has unprecedented power in the modern Republican party, and is indeed now the ideological center of that party... as Democrats keep pointing out (in their confusion, thinking it benefits them).

Where is Mr. Rauch's observation that "the Democratic party has acquired its distinctively tart left-wing flavor largely because it has absorbed (in fact, to a significant extent has organizationally merged with) the secular left"? Well... he didn't make it. But I just did... using his words from the quote above.

Mr. Rauch does not mention a single example from the left of a "fringe group" being welcomed into the Democratic party and becoming its new center. That's because no such example exists. It is difficult to *name* an ideological center to the party, other than the phrase "secular left", which is rejected by party mavens as pejorative. All that is necessary is to note the willingness of the "religious right" to accept *that* label, and the identity crisis of the left is made clear.

Underlying all of this is a significant problem for Democrats, namely that there is no true ideological center that unites its various factions. It frequently appears to be a coalition of single issue voters, each with a particular complaint against the traditional American status quo, whose single issues are not related in any obvious way. There seems very much to be an attitude of "I'll cheer for your single issue if you'll cheer for mine".

What will happen in modern electoral politics if even one third to one half of *church going* African-Amercians begin to vote with their natural ideological allies, namely the modern Republican party? Or if religious Hispanics do the same?

The MSM has done a fabulous job of controlling the information received by these groups up to now... but that dominance of communication channels is fading, and as these "minority groups" come to realize that Republicans offer school choice and other education reforms, real economic opportunity, strong family policies and life affirming attitudes, some in these groups can (and I think will) change their voting patterns.

I'll be interested to read Mr. Rauch's response to that change... in about 10-20 years. Who will be the "moderates" then?

I'd be fascinated to see Mr. Rauch rewrite his article (if he really believes his thesis) in the way I rewrote his quote above... just reversing all the language referring to parties and left/right labels, and see if he can find examples that make it all make as much sense to him as those he used. If he can't do that.... well, maybe the differences are as real between the "centers" of each party as it seems to some of us. The fact that he didn't do it that way in the first place, regardless of his protestations of human frailty now, is telling.

Jonathon Rauch's Innumeracy

Atlantic Monthly's Jonathan Rauch (http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/200501/rauch) appears to struggle with basic arithmetic.

“On balance it is probably healthier if religious conservatives are inside the political system than if they operate as insurgents and provocateurs on the outside. Better they should write anti-abortion planks into the Republican platform than bomb abortion clinics. The same is true of the left. The clashes over civil rights and Vietnam turned into street warfare partly because activists were locked out of their own party establishments and had to fight, literally, to be heard. When Michael Moore receives a hero’s welcome at the Democratic National Convention, we moderates grumble; but if the parties engage fierce activists while marginalizing tame centrists, that is probably better for the social peace than the other way around.”

This seems to be a peculiar sort of innumeracy. "Religious conservatives", by Mr. Rauch's definition, make up about half the modern Republican party.... or more. Their influence is not proportional to their willingness to do violence as a disgruntled minority (or it would be exceedingly small, since only the very crazy few are violent.... and they are by definition not really "religious conservatives," anyway). Instead, the influence of "religious conservatives" is proportional to their numbers, i.e., a majority of the party, or something very close to it.

"Religious conservatives" did not attain their influence through marches (though some have marched, in both the civil rights and pro-life movements). Nor was power gained by intimidation, the promotion of any kind of violence, or any other sort of "acting out." Mr. Rauch seems to assume some kind of proportionality of the number of (presumably conservative right) potential abortion clinic bombers to (presumably liberal left) street fighting war protesters of bygone years.... some of whom are back.

Hmm... if this proportionality were true, few abortion clinics would have been left standing in America even before the 1994 Republican congressional victories, after 20 years of having been mostly "ignored" by both parties.

Some leftists will paint pro-life demonstrators with the same brush as the 1960's anti-war activists... as if there were some moral or tactical parity. The fact seems to be that main-stream media have given mostly negative coverage to pro-life "protest", while positive media coverage of the perspectives of anti-war activists is a large part of what led to their (execrable) successes.

Mr. Rauch tries a real fast one in his commingling of civil rights protests with anti-war protests. The former had a high proportion of "religious conservatives" and were virtually non-violent on the part of the protesters (in no small part *because* of religious belief), while the latter emanated largely from the left, clearly used violence and provocation of it as a tool, and were part of the early "culture wars."

The comparison of the influence of "religous conservatives" in the Republican party to Michael Moore's reception at the Democratic convention is *exactly* backwards. In contrast to "moderate Democrats" grumbling about (extreme leftist) Moore, it was Republican conservatives grumbling about the lionizing of "Republican moderates" at the Republican convention.

Mr. Rauch can't count, apparently. He also doesn't appreciate the fundamental position of people who believe in something as quaint as right and wrong... namely that they are unwilling to do wrong in order to achieve what is right.

John and Ken look kinda stupid today

David Dreier Wins Big!

And John and Ken of LA afternoon drivetime radio must be a bit, uh, disappointed.

They had targeted Dreier (Rep.) as a "political human sacrifice" because of his supposedly poor record on fighting illegal immigration, a big issue in California. John and Ken pride themselves on their "political independence", having also fought in the battle to unseat former Governor Gray Davis.

The story was like this: since Republicans don't do any better at stopping illegal immigration than Dems, why should we vote for them just because we hope they will? So John and Ken tried to get Republicans to vote against Dreier, just to "send a message" that poor performance on the issue would no longer be tolerated.

What John and Ken don't get: the major media is a MUCH larger problem than the politicians in this arena. The vast majority of news coverage is sympathetic to illegals, not to those who are hurt by the illegals being here.

J&K made much of the fact that Dreier stopped coming on their show to be assaulted by them.

I'll be really impressed when they get the editors of the LA Times and network news shows to come on for hour long to segments to be grilled on their news coverage re: illegals.

In the meantime, Dreier proved that such stunts don't work, by winning handily with an 11% margin over his nearest opponent., 54% to 43%. Hopefully, J&K will eat some humble pie on air, and then invite the major news bottleneck guardians to come on and talk about the issue. I doubt they'll get a lot of response from them, though....

John and Ken are right that the Republicans talk a lot more than they act on the issue. They need to use their clout (of which they do have a little, in spite of failing here) to attach the real problem.

Radio's John and Ken miss the point

John and Ken have a radio show in LA.

A couple of days ago they blasted Hugh Hewitt for supporting David Dreier in his re-election bid to the House of Representatives. Dreier is the target of John and Ken's "political human sacrifice" in their anti-illegal alien campaign. Their point, true as far as it goes, is that Republicans don't have a greatly better record on handling the illegals problem than Democrats, though they talk about it more.

The segment I heard blasting Hugh was followed by a segment on the initiative to weaken California's "three strikes" law in various ways. They had an academic from a local university on the show, who pointed out the reduction in the crime rate that seems associated with the current three strikes law. One of their questions to the academic was, "Why does the public seem to support this weakening of the current sentencing laws, when they have clearly worked to reduce crime?"

The answer from the academic, and a telling one it is, was this: 90% of the media coverage of the current three strikes law is negative towards the law, full of unusual cases of people getting long sentences for stealing pizza, etc., even though there are few problems of this sort in the application of the law (what if the pizza thief had multiple prior major crimes?).

The radio boys failed to make the connection to the issue of Republican action regarding the problem of illegal aliens, namely that whenever a strong action is taken by any Republican, the media is full of mostly negative coverage. When elections hang by relatively slim margins, this makes it hard to convince Republicans to do what they'd like to do in their hearts, namely take strong action to police the borders and round up illegals for deportation, and punish employers who knowingly hire them.

So, hey, John and Ken: If you REALLY feel as strongly about the issue of illegal aliens as you say, then lay off the relatively easy target of politicians who don't always walk their talk, just for awhile, and concentrate on who intimidates those politicians, namely the major media. Feeling your populist oats, boys? Impressed with the fervor you can whip up? Why not take on someone who has as much access to the public ear as you do (which almost no politician does, which is what makes them relatively easy targets for you), and go after every single article or news broadcast that unfairly slants the coverage in favor of illegals?

You've discovered by now that politicans you help elect, like Arnold Schwarzenegger, don't always (or often?) do what you hoped. They same will be true of Dreier's replacement, if you're successful.

Political behavior of this sort is the symptom, not the root of the problem, as long as the main stream media get away with murdering the facts.

I'll take you seriously when you spend as many on-air hours on poor news coverage of the illegals problem as you spend on your little political stunt... In the meantime, Hugh's show comes on at the same time as yours...

Not even close

Hugh's symposium question this week:

"Vox Blogoli IV: Why vote for Bush, and what's wrong with Kerry?"

I'm pro-Bush because:

1) He'll do a better job of making terror attacks on the USA less likely in the short term, because he gets it, because he puts it before his poll numbers, and because he sincerely seeks God's help.

2) He'll do a better job of continuing processes he's already begun (that Kerry doesn't even understand) to reduce long term risks of Islamic extremism, by attacking the very roots of it with "liberty-imperialism."

3) On the domestic front, reducing taxes, judicial activism and the school dropout rate are all good things.

I'm anti-Kerry because:

1) He doesn't get it in the war with Islamic extremism.

2) He apparently does very little without calculating personal benefit in the polls. He'll say anything to get elected. He seems to have no long-term plan to reduce the danger.... except to recycle old plans that have already failed.

3) He is for more taxes, more judical activism, and maintenance of the status quo in education.... all recipes for disaster, short and long term.

Some of it boils down to this: I trust George Bush to do his very best, even when he is at political risk, and to learn on the job. John Kerry has already proved that he doesn't learn on the job, and will do exactly what he thinks is indicated for his short-term political benefit.

A penny for my thoughts

Well... it doesn't even cost that much.