Via Atrios -- the media whores are already talking down the post-convention bounce. Newsweek is calling it a "baby bounce": "Kerry’s four-point “bounce” is the smallest in the history of the NEWSWEEK poll."

 

Hey, hey, hey, hey, tell me what'd I say ...

 

That's the second paragraph. If you keep reading, however, the news for Kerry gets better.

 

Atrios also wonders about the Cheney loyalty oaths ... "How the hell are Bush/Cheney going to campaign seriously given the extreme private nature of all of their events and the extreme security associated with them?" Good point. Very weird.

 

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A few weeks back, Bush strategist Matthew Dowd released a memo arguing that, based on “historical trends,” the Kerry-Edwards ticket ought to emerge from Boston with a 15-point lead. Of course, like anything else you spoon feed the media, that became a buzz and then a mantra. And you can bet the republicans will be scoffing if Kerry doesn’t immediately show those lofty numbers in every single poll.

But no one ever bothered to examine the republican claim on its surface.  Going into the convention, the country is more or less split 45-45, with third party candidate Ralph Nader polling around 4 per cent or so.  Even assuming those numbers are soft, that leaves only about 6-8 per cent or so of undecided voters left out there to sway. 

So where is that 15 per cent supposed to come from?  Are a few nights worth of speeches extolling Kerry and his ideals supposed to win over every undecided voter plus shake loose 4 percent of the other guys’ votes as well?!

Here’s the math: for Kerry to literally get a 15 percent bounce, he’d have to go up to 60%, leaving Bush and Nader to share the other the 40%.  In other words, to achieve a Dowd’s “historical” fifteen percent bounce he’d have to end up twenty points ahead!

Or, to simply achieve a 15 percent spread in the numbers, Kerry has to poll at 57%, with Bush going down to 42%, and Nader falling off the earth at one percent.  And remember, that leaves no undecided voters anywhere on the continent.  I’m not a historian, but I don’t believe there is any historical basis for that nifty trick. [Kevin Kelton, Washington Dispatch, July 29, 2004]

So keep watch for the "15 percent" talking point, and expect the "anchors" like Blitzer and Matthews to not challenge it.

Important Update

Every blogger in Left Blogistan will be linking Krugman today. Click here to see why.

A sullen President George W. Bush is withdrawing more and more from aides and senior staff, retreating into a private, paranoid world where only the ardent loyalists are welcome. ... Bush’s erratic behavior and sharp mood swings led White House physician Col. Richard J. Tubb to put the President on powerful anti-depressant drugs after he stormed off stage rather than answer reporters' questions about his relationship with indicted Enron executive Kenneth J. Lay, but White House insiders say the strong, prescription medications seem to increase Bush’s sullen behavior towards those around him.

I think we have to be very careful about these Capitol Hill Blue reports, because they don't seem to be corroborated anywhere. Doesn't mean there isn't some truth in them, though.

Speaking as someone with lots of personal experience with depression and the drugs that treat it, I question whether Bush's behavior indicates depression. Depressives are usually enervated and may spend hours staring vacantly at wallpaper, although on the inside they may be overcome with emotional pain and anxiety. Certainly the boy ain't right, but I don't think his problem is depression.

In his 1992 campaign, Clinton vowed to drag the party into the new economy, bringing it toward the center on social and economic issues that mattered to an anxious middle class. Parts of that agenda, like a middle-class tax credit and welfare reform, met with success. But weakened by the Republican takeover of Congress and then his impeachment, Clinton's lasting legacy to the party seems to have amounted to something far less than an ideological modernization; somewhere along the line, Clintonism devolved into a series of rhetorical gimmicks -- ''fighting for working families,'' ''working hard and playing by the rules'' -- aimed at appeasing conservatives and winning over pet constituencies like ''soccer moms'' and ''office park dads.'' Underneath all the now-tired mantras, there remains a vacuum at the core of the party, an absence of any transformative worldview for the century unfurling before us.

On the surface, the fiery rhetoric and animus of 2003 and early 2004 were directed at President Bush. And to some degree of course they were. But the punch of that rhetoric derived not so much from Democrats' antipathy for President Bush as from a pitched battle, almost a rebellion, within the Democratic party -- the grassroots of the Democratic party insisting that Washington Democrats were compromising with the president over particulars when he was leading the country in a direction that had to be opposed across the board. Fiery rhetoric against President Bush was fiery rhetoric against compromise and accomodation with him. In other words, it was to a very real degree aimed at other Democrats.

There's something more here than dislike at Bush. Indeed, anger at Bush just isn't around. Instead, there's a beginning of a conversation about where to take the party, combined with a hopeful feeling not just that Bush can lose, but that the Democrats can win. It's like the first shoots of spring after a long winter.

People who are resolutely pro-choice believe that life begins at birth, and that a woman has a right to abort what is taking place in her own body any time during a pregnancy.

People who are resolutely pro-life believe that life begins at conception and that aborting that embryo or fetus is akin to murder.

 

Though the two sides disagree about when life begins, they agree on what they are arguing about.

I disagree that there are only two sides. There are myriad "pro-choice" sides, even without the other side. So I hardly think the "two sides" "agree on what they are arguing about."

You can be pro-choice with no restrictions on abortion, or pro-life with absolute restrictions, or - like most Americans - comfortable enough with current law discouraging late-term abortion. But most find it difficult in logic to be for both extremes at the same time.

As I believe in neither extreme as Mr. Safire describes them, it's no problem for me at all. But let's take his assumptions one at a time.

People who are resolutely pro-choice believe that life begins at birth

I don't doubt there are a few people out there who think that way, just as I have no doubt there are a few people out there who believe they've been abducted by aliens. But it's an irrational statement on its face, since the product of pregnancy is demonstrably living at all stages of development, and I don't think it's a common opinion.

IMO any sentence that kicks off with "Life begins..." is false. Science cannot tell us with certainty that life ever begins. All we know is that life appeared on this planet a very long time ago. Whether it originated on this planet, by divine creation or by chemical reaction; or whether earth was seeded with life by meteorites from Mars (which doesn't tell us how life got to Mars) or by space traveling aliens, we do not know.

Individual organisms begin and end, but life itself may be beginingless and endless.

However life got here, since appearing on earth it has continued. It travels from form to form as a flame passes from candle to candle, celebrating itself in infinite manifestations. A not-living thing cannot become a living thing. Living things can only be created by life.

Safire doesn't mention this, but the other howler I sometimes hear is that abortion-rights advocates deny a human fetus is human. That's silly; of course the product of a human pregnancy is human. Duh.

It's at this point the anti-rights types start flapping around, sputtering ... if you think a fetus is human life, that means you must advocate MURDER!!!!! (Sound effect: Organ glissando in F minor)

No. The product of pregnancy may be human life from conception, but at conception it's in a very primitive, pre-hominid (indeed, pre-vertebrate) and insentient form.

Therefore, can we call an embryo a person, with rights that trump the rights of the mother?  That's silly, I say. Of course not.

But when does personhood begin? This is not a question science can answer. There is no clear, bright line. DNA aside, there more difference between a blastocyst and a viable fetus than between spinach and a raccoon. But the change from a collection of cells to a viable organism is incremental. Unlike an oven-stuffer roaster, there's no little plastic thingy to pop up and tell us when personhood has arrived.

Indeed, as personhood is a cultural-social construct, I promise you we would reach an impasse trying to agree what personhood is, never mind when it begins. (Or if it is; see, for example, the Buddhist teaching of anatta.)

... a woman has a right to abort what is taking place in her own body any time during a pregnancy.

I (and, I suspect, most advocates of abortion rights) would have no problem at all prohibiting elective abortions when there is even a remote possibility the fetus might be viable -- as long as exceptions are made for pregnancies posing a severe health threat to the mother or in cases of severe fetal defect. Then, I think, the mother, the couple, the parents, should be given the choice to terminate. And they should be able to make that choice privately, in consultation with physicians, without having to petition a government tribunal.

Many who support abortion rights do so for this reason: Where abortion is illegal or difficult to obtain, abortions are performed later in pregnancy. The Alan Guttmacher Institute has all kinds of data showing that making abortions illegal has little impact on the rate of abortion. See especially this study, Chart C. 

In the United States today, 88 percent of abortions take place in the first trimester. 95 percent of abortions are performed by the 15th week of gestation. According to Guttmacher, almost half of the women having later abortions say they were delayed because of problems in affording, finding or getting to abortion services. In other words, were it not for the endless work of the so-called "right to life" brigade to make getting an abortion difficult, a higher percentage of abortions would be performed in the first trimester.

And let us not forget the coat hanger. Where abortions are illegal, women risk their lives to obtain them. Abortion methods in Latin America, for example, include punching the stomach, inserting sharp objects (e.g. knitting needles, sticks), and flushing the womb with caustic chemicals like bleach. (See Table 5.)

To me, keeping abortion legal has less to do with a right to do whatever one wants with one's body, than with a genuine respect for life and the living of life. And that means I respect the lives and experiences and personhood of those women who decide, for whatever reason, they are not prepared to continue a pregnancy. I have no right to make that decision for someone else.

And sometimes I might disagree with those decisions. It's terribly sad to terminate a pregnancy. But I know that if the decision were left to government bureaucracy, many women who really need abortions would be denied them.

People who are resolutely pro-life believe that life begins at conception and that aborting that embryo or fetus is akin to murder.

That may be, although many of those same people make exceptions -- for rape, for incest, for cases of fetal deformity. Seems a tad inconsistent. But the anti-rights people didn't vote for me to speak for them.

Though the two sides disagree about when life begins, they agree on what they are arguing about.

But we don't. After all these years, we still don't. Those on the fringes wear T-shirts and bumper stickers and scream slogans, but the fringes do not represent most people. I think most people are seeking a middle way. They want to find a balance that extends compassion to both the woman and the fetus.

You can be pro-choice with no restrictions on abortion, or pro-life with absolute restrictions, or - like most Americans - comfortable enough with current law discouraging late-term abortion. But most find it difficult in logic to be for both extremes at the same time.

I think Safire is right that most Americans are comfortable enough with current law discouraging late-term abortion. And most people who call themselves pro-choice would be more comfortable with laws discouraging late-term abortion if we weren't endlessly fighting "junk" legislation like this and this.

IMO the abortion fight is no longer being waged between pro-choice and anti-choice factions. It is being fought between extremist anti-choice factions and everyone else, not to mention anti-choice factions and medical science.

Now, Safire's point is that John Kerry is a "straddler" because he respects abortions rights but also believes life begins at conception. John Kerry might also believe that Catholic communion is necessary to enter into Heaven, but I don't see him trying to impose that belief through legislation.

Let us be logical, Mr. Safire.  

Let's begin by re-imagining the blue-collar man, for we do not normally think of him as a fearful man. ... Since the l970s, the blue-collar man has taken a lot of economic hits. The buying power of his paycheck, the size of his benefits, the security of his job -- all these have diminished. ... For anyone who stakes his pride on earning an honest day's pay, this economic fall is, unsurprisingly enough, hard to bear. How, then, do these blue-collar men feel about it? Ed Landry said he felt "numb." Others are anxious, humiliated and, as who wouldn't be, fearful. But in cultural terms, Nascar Dad isn't supposed to feel afraid. What he can feel though is angry. As Susan Faludi has described so well in her book Stiffed, that is what many such men feel. As a friend who works in a Maine lumber mill among blue-collar Republicans explained about his co-workers, "They felt that everyone else -- women, kids, minorities -- were all moving up, and they felt like they were moving down. Even the spotted owl seemed like it was on its way up, while he and his job, were on the way down. And he's angry."

Buzzflash: ... Bush can't communicate directly to the white male about how he stands for the white male being on top, so there's a lot of coding going on, it seems. And much of this is subliminal, because Bush can't say, well, I keep Laura in her place, but --

Hochschild: You never see her. She's in a lockbox.

BuzzFlash: And she's always walking behind him and is carefully scripted to say as little as possible. If she says anything, it's once or twice a month, and it's a sentence or two, or maybe a highly controlled interview. In their relationship, she symbolizes the woman who is always deferential to the husband. ...  He's picking their pockets but saying to them -- with a wink and a nod, in politically correct code words and symbols -- like that all-male signing of the late-term abortion bill, where only white males were present -- the white guys are in charge here. "Notice there's no women," Bush is coding to them. "We're reigning them in, but not officially -- we're going to say we're all for women."

And then a wink, a wink and a nod.

This National Review Online article describes Laura Bush as an ideal First Lady: "She is poised, well-read, low-key, and rarely discusses controversial issues in depth [i.e., she keeps her mouth shut and knows her place -- maha] She seems to believe her husband was elected and that, as First Lady, she is there to support him. ... We are comfortable with Laura Bush. A former teacher, she is non-threatening, classy, and devoted to mother-and-apple-pie issues like literacy and schools. She is easy to interview but journalists are not going to hear her spouting off about how much she has come to dislike Democratic spin, even if she does." [emphasis added]

The author, Sheri Annis, describes Teresa Heinz Kerry as "refreshing." But clearly, she finds THK a little disturbing and possibly a freak:. "She does not stick to the talking points. In fact, Heinz Kerry described Republican charges about her and her husband as un-American during the couple's joint 60 Minutes appearance. Such heated rhetoric is no way to win over swing voters.... Teresa Heinz Kerry didn't land on the cover of Newsweek because she's a strong, independent woman, but because she's viewed as quirky."

Um, how many years has it been since Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique? (Forty-one, I believe.)

In 1973 I had a summer job working for the PR department of the Missouri State Fair. One of my duties was to write stories for home-town papers about the winners of livestock shows. So I spent a couple of weeks attending cattle competitions.

The dairy cattle judges said something peculiar whenever they gave a prize to a cow; something like, "I like this here cow 'cause she's got a good udder on her and good femininity." This seemed  more like Miss America than Best 2-Year-Old Holstein.

So finally I asked one of the judges what he meant by "good femininity." He looked bemused. It means, he said, that she stays out in the pasture an' chews her cud and don't cause no trouble.

The difference between the Dems and the Pugs is that Dems aren't afraid of women who cause trouble. Dems seem to enjoy trouble-causing women, in fact.

But Pugs are afraid of them. Pugs prefer Holsteins to human women. This is why Pugs are weenies.

Synopsis: Democrats are lying about the dangers of computer voting without a paper trail. Compare contrast with today's Paul Krugman column: "Fear of Fraud."

James Taranto on Presidential Leadership

Taranto chokes back panic mode (see previous blog, below) and rationalizes why winning Ohio is unimportant to the GOP.

Scott Simon, "When Punchline Trumps Honesty: There's more McCarthy than Murrow in the work of Michael Moore."

The wingnuts just can't get over F9/11, can they? Panic mode, people?

And have you noticed none of these people write coherently? WSJ's turgid rhetoric is very hard to follow. This is, of course, deliberate.

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Mahareader Allan F. responded to this morning's blog:

It's been my observation that Bush and all his ilk have been doing something since the election 2000, this behaviour is best described as "blaming your opponent for the thing you are most vulnerable in" (i.e., Gore is a liar vs. I served my military duty honorably, you can find many more examples) It's second nature for Bush to do this, and it works: you don't reply back with the truth because it sounds like a school yard fight. ( I can hear him in my head blaming Jeb for something he did as a kid using the same line of obfuscation with Mama Barbara. I wasn't there, mind, but I can still hear it. Maybe I should see a doctor. "Chronic Bush Fatigue.")

Amen, Bro' Allan.

It is high time the political class woke up to the fact that the US polls are giving a pretty consistent message that cannot be dismissed merely because it doesn't fit the streetwise assumption that Bush will win. Yet the reality is that the polling numbers in the Bush-Kerry contest have been saying something strikingly consistent ever since Kerry emerged as the Democratic contender in March.

That something is that Bush is losing and Kerry is winning. ...

The other important point is that many of Kerry's strongest gains are in the all-important battleground states. ... On that basis, Kerry had a 322-216 vote advantage in the electoral college.

It's no time for us Real Patriots to be complacent, of course. But I think it's way past time for the freep and wingnuts and Bushies to be in panic mode.

 

Kaus's snarks are so far removed from verifiable reality I can hardly tell exactly what he's snarking about. The most disturbing thing about Kaus (which bleeds over onto most of the Right Blogosphere) is the way he assumes that news sources giving positive news about Bush are pro-Bush, but news sources giving negative news about Bush only do so because they are anti-Bush. Kaus assumes that everyone lies and spins to further an ideological agenda.

 

I'd be the last one to say that establishment media are always objective and factual. But as many have pointed out, this assumption that establishment media are pro-liberal and report negative news about conservatives only to promote a liberal agenda gives the wingnuts permission, in their minds, to lie and spin and twist to promote their wingnut agenda.