Kerry either is stuck in Dukakis – mode with his response to the “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” — Dukakis – lite in the sense that he is responding, at least, or he’s carefully gotten his ducks in a row to utterly nail Bush Administration — the lawsuit coming that Bush coordinated his attacks with Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

We’re about to find out. If the former is the case, he’s lost a chunk of the vote — his vote amongst veterans now sagging a bit, and it will be said that he did not heed the lessons from the comparison between Dukakis losing campaign of 1988 strategy and the Clinton winning campaign strategy of 1992. Joshua Micah Marshal is probably correct. The Bush assault has little to do with Kerry’s wounds, but with a weird post-modernist conception of signifiers.

Notice the harbinger of the carefully constructed innuendo that Kerry threw a grenade at himself, saying essentially that Kerry’s not used to this heat, the heat that we’re throwing at him. It’s all a test of machismo.

If the latter is the case, the voters who have swung toward Bush — or rather against Kerry — because of this matter will now swing back to Kerry with avengance.

But, even if the latter is the case, I’d guess that a little Carvillian “War Room” real-time lines of attack would innoculate even the short-term damage.

And Karl Rove, because the only way to win the election is by turning it into a contest over the signifiers and the signified, will try to keep it looming in the background as we turn to the next questiont that Kerry left an opening toward by not even bothering to address at the DNC Convention: the meaning of his post – Vietnam War protesting. Note that the new Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ad’s message: “Kerry accused the Vietnam Soldiers of Committing War – Crimes, and let them down”.

In the meantime, the RNC’s line of attacks are as follows:

(1) Even though we deny that we have anything to do with Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, we do have something to do with Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, and you have as much invested in Moveon.org and the Media Fund, and Moveon.org is a shadowy organization and a disgrace, and we should do something about these 527s.

Where do you stand on 527s, Kerry? Huh? Huh? Huh?

See…

(2) Wow. Kerry attacked the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

Check out his “wild eyes”.

The term “wild eyed” has become the new RNC talking-point watch-word.

It started with Howard Dean. It continued with the Internet ad of “The Coalition of the Wild-Eyed.”

This is a psychological game, any counter-attack against you is marginalized by its very nature of being a counter-attack, saying that they are desperate.

Odd, actually. Dejavu.

Marc Racicot used the term, and we can now expect every bozo on Fox News and talk radio to spread it around like butter.

You can throw it back to some of the thrusts from the “Swift Boat” allegations: was Kerry playing Rambo, shooting at innocent Vietnam innocents? (And, assuming he was, from the viewpoint of the “Swift Boat Veterans’ — hawks one and all — how do you reconcile that criticism with the oft-put suggestion that “there is no such thing as a politically correct war”? And then back into his post-war speeches that, yes, there were war crimes being committed…)

(3) Noticed this on Drudge: The Media’s expose on the Swifters — the recent NY Times story on Bush – Swift ties and the recent Washington Post story on one of the member’s inconsistencies and record-distortion? It’s the Liberal Media, you know, and … all lies.

In this case: I hate it when the Truth has a liberal bias.

So, John Kerry’s war wounds are… self-inflicted?

See: this is push-back against John Kerry’s push-back ad that ends with the line “And he still has a piece of shrapnel in his leg today.” The image of John Kerry that they want to conjure up is one of a man who went to Vietnam with the sole and express purpose of setting up his 2004 presidential campaign.

What I want to know is: how do you throw a grenade into your leg? If you’re wanting to wound youself, why a grenade? Isn’t that a little bit too dangerous — perhaps a mere gun wound would work enough without the danger that the grenade would explode on yourself and kill you… or is that type of wound not as impressive as a grenade wound?

And what’s the trajectory of the shrapnel that is going into John Kerry’s skin?

Overall, a triumph of the Right-Wing Echo Chamber. You will notice that the Tony Snows of the world — ie: the supposed neutral hosts for Fox News’s “straight” news shows — deem that the Swift Boat Vets for Truth are “credible” and “at least need to be listened to”, and deemed Richard Clarke as “not credible” for various reasons.

(BTW: this is fairly interesting for our new minituiae induced politics of diversion.)

The weird thing is that I thought he had already been named the “Keynote Speaker”. But, I guess the RNC just decided now to place him at the mythical “there”.

So, do we compare his speech to his own 1992 Keynote Speech at the DNC Convention or to Barack Obama’s Keynote Speech?

Some stuff on Senator Zell Miller.

Wait a minute!

He endorsed wackjob Cynthia McKinney when she ran successfully(the first time) for house of Representatives.

He… endorsed… Cynthia… McKinnley? Forget whatever your politics are on the matter and whatever the hell you think the Democratic Party should stand for — but: his entire thesis is that oldie and goodie about Liberal Leftists Hijacking the good olde Democratic Party and taking it out of step with the reality and concerns of ordianary people — especially in the South (he appears to be quite sensitive of his hill-billy up-bringing), etc etc blah blah blah.

As for McKinnley … the Green Party was considering running her for the Presidency. WHERE DO YOU THINK SHE FALLS ON THE LEFT-RIGHT SPECTRUM?

This completely alters my view of his political trajectory. I had assumed he was a moderate — perhaps slightly conservative — Democrat, and I assumed that that was why he helped offer up the nation the “New Democrat” known as Bill Clinton. From there, I assumed he had somehow bought the right-wing hype about Clinton’s “Historic Concentrated Liberalism”. (Earlier posts that I find myself repeatedly re-linking show how dubious I find his grievances with Clinton — wait a minute for it to jump to the entry –, but to each their own.), and perhaps culture-shock upon entering the Senate and seeing Ted Kennedy in his own party. Or something to that effect.

But it now appears that I’ve given him too much credit.

I note this line in this article:

A maverick who often votes with Republicans

Incorrect. He’s a “maverick” who “always” votes with Republicans.

More fun:

“Senator Miller’s support is indicative of the broad support the Republican Party has earned under President Bush’s compassionate conservative leadership as Americans reject the ‘out of the mainstream’ direction of John Kerry’s Democratic Party.”

“Out of the mainstream” is the Democratic Party, eh? Right. Because Zell Miller speaks for ordinary Americans about ordinary concerns.

Kitchen table issues.

The number of times I’ve heard ordinary Americans disappointed with the Seventeenth Amendmen, yelling out “Why do these Liberal Elitists keep defending the Seventeenth Amendment? Us regular folk just can’t catch a break, what with this Seventeenth Amendment and all.

And…

The number of ordinary people who have screamed out, looking for a hero that’ll take on The Culture of the Far Left which brought us “that ignoramus with his pointed head stuck up through a hole he had cut in the flag of the United States of America, screaming about having ‘a bottle of scotch and watching lots of crotch.” …

The Culture of the Far Left that brings us fervent Iraq War supporters that perform at RNC Conventions.

Never mind, though.

Doug Bereuter, retiring Republican Representative from the great state of Nebraska, senior member of the House International Relations Committee and vice chairman of the House Intelligence Committee:

Knowing now what I know about the reliance on the tenuous or insufficiently corroborated intelligence used to conclude that Saddam maintained a substantial WMD (weapons of mass destruction) arsenal, I believe that launching the pre-emptive military action was not justified.

Worth noting: I like this answer to the question “Knowing what you know now…?” than I like John Kerry’s answer. But, what are you gonna do?

And, here’s the zinger:

Left unresolved for now is whether intelligence was intentionally misconstrued to justify military action.

What’s neat is that that question is going to remain unresolved, because the Congressional investigation looking into Intelligence failures regarding the matter in question has been carefully framed to not look into this unresolved question.

Further along, we get to:

The cost in casualties is already large and growing, and the immediate and long-term financial costs are incredible.

But… Rumsfeld and Cheney said back in 2002 that the Oil Revenues would pay for it all, and that allies would be clamoring to help out with the process after our grand victory shows them the errors of their ways, even further lessening the costs! Why, as Ahmad Chalabi put it, “Best of all, the INC will do this all for free!”

From the beginning of the conflict, it was doubtful that we for long would be seen as liberators, but instead increasingly as an occupying force.

Lessons learned in Conquering Nations 101…

Now we are immersed in a dangerous, costly mess, and there is no easy and quick way to end our responsibilities in Iraq without creating bigger future problems in the region and, in general, in the Muslim world.

Okay, that’s enough of Bereatuer. I’m guessing that he now regrets his “yes” vote for the Iraq War Resolution.

Turn to Joseph Lieberman for a prompt response. Where’s “The Committee on Present Danger Part III” when we need it, to straighten out wavering support to our noble quest?

What does David Kay, Bush’s hand-picked man to head the weapon’s inspectors after that clueless Hans Blix completely and utterly failed to expose Saddam Hussein’s massive stockpiles of weapons of the mass of the destruction, have to say these days?

The dog that did not bark in the case of Iraq’s W.M.D. weapons program, quite frankly, in my view, is the National Security Council.

Take that, Ms. Rice!

Where was the National Security Council when, apparently, the president expressed his own doubt about the adequacy of the case concerning Iraq’s W.M.D. weapons that was made before him?

Why was the secretary of state sent to the C.I.A. to personally vet the data that he was to take the Security Council in New York, and ultimately left to hang in the wind for data that was misleading and, in some cases, absolutely false and known by parts of the intelligence community to be false? Where was the N.S.C. then?

What — must we check Condellezza’s Rice’s minutes for all of 2002?

And… our new Intelligence Czar?

Until this is taken on board and people and organizations are held responsible for this failure, I have a real difficulty in seeking how a national intelligence director can correct these failures.

As the nation moves boxes around, I’m left with the question: Don’t we already have that job, anyway? “National Security Advisor”, or something to that effect?

The signs suggest that, barring a sudden change in the internal public approval dynamics, the conventional wisdom that this election is a tug-of-war over a handful of exubran Ohio voters is about to shift to one that posits a general sense of desperation in the Bush camp.

Which doesn’t go well with Bush’s attempted aura of Confidence Maximus.

This is barring the possibility that the internal dynamics will change as Kerry’s performance falls flat.

In most other elections, the current dynamics and polling would have the latter being the current horse-race storyline. A combination of factors stop the regular story-line: the unpredictable dynamics of post 9/11 politics that may or may not change the conventional wisdom, and the love affair with the “50/50” “blue state — red state” storyline.

David Broder, the harbinger of the Washington elite’s “conventional wisdom”, chimed in within the past week (and, indeed, has followed Zogby and some guy from the south… Mr. Cook holds what may be becoming the contrary view at this point in time) that we’re, for better or worse, in Kerry-Land.

Zogby has just updated their “swing states poling” list — four new states that Bush carried in 2000.

All despite Kerry’s more than evident weaknesses as a candidate — weaknesses that could still torpedo him.

A couple weeks ago, I had thought that I had seen the outer limits of what any possible Kerry landslide would look like, looking at the current forecasts at electoralvote.com. Bush was up in Virginia by 3 percentage points. Indeed, Bush’s numbers must have shown the same thing, because — there he was: campaigning in Virginia.

But, it appears I was incorrect. Kerry’s position has since improved. Bush is now behind in the supposed bell-weather state of Ohio by 9 points, and… try this state out:

Georgia. Bush: 46%. Kerry: 41%. Nader: 1%.

The state that brought us Jimmy Carter and Zell Miller toward the end of its Democratic stranglehold, transformed to swing over the other way to bring us Sonny Purdue and Zell Miller … a few more polls like this and we’ll see Bush moving into a proverbial shell. Is it possible? Can it at least be close enough to push the Democratic candidate for Senator past the finish line — a race that has been essentially written off as a Republican “gain” from psuedo-Democrat Zell Miller. (The irony of that situation being: the Senate candidate — Majette– was elected in 2002 to a House seat in a primary to a left-wing bomb-thrower McKinnley — the right-ward tilt of the election year bringing her to power. Cynthia McKinnley has since re-won this seat, as Ms. Majette pursued the Senate. Should she win, it’d be part of the same liberal-shift in the winds that had McKinnley win her seat. Still, she’s probably due to lose.) Difficult to fathom, and this poll may just be an abberation — but, on the other hand… if… if… and if… then we’re stuck at the “What is happening here?” moment.

More important than Kerry actually winning Virginia or Georgia is re-creating the electoral map and changing the calculus for winning campaigns.

The previous calculus, essentially, had the states of Arkansas and Florida being the Southern states that the Democrats had any chance of — Arkansas because of Bill Clinton, Florida because half of it is culturally northern. In retrospect, Tennessee doesn’t seem too surprising: sure Gore lost it, but — to build on a previous post on an esoteric political topic: while the other Southern states were tossing out Democrats of the Strom Thurmond and George Wallace variety, Tennessee brought us Al Gore, Sr. and Estes Kefauver! Louisiania was the only other state in the South with a viable Democratic Party left — very good at churning out Conservative Democrats, at a possibility to hold off as the old Southern Democrats from another era retired across the South.

It’s never a good idea for a political party to write off large sections of the country. Besides which, conventional wisdom seems to shift in the wind. Hell — as late as 1998, the Democratic Party was thought to have re-found its groove in that there South, bottomed-out, and back on the rebound. (Think John Edwards.) Two years later, Al Gore picked up nary a Southern state, and two years after that — Georgia chunked out its Democratic Party — and the conventional wisdom reverted to form: the Democrats are dead to the South.

The South has been the bed-rock for the Republican Coalition’s Majority since Nixon, borne out of Barry Goldwater’s 1964 base of support. The book The Emerging Republican Majority laid out the framework for the Republican’s electoral success, written as the Democratic coalition was falling apart. It’s not too difficult to figure how the Democratic Coaliton could end up unraveling: the party of Jefferson Davis becomes the home for blacks, and at some point, on a national level, it’d have to decide one constituency or the other.

Georgia should probably vanish from the list of “close states”… barring a Kerry rout. But, it looks as though Virginia is there to stay. The Democratic Party dents into the Republican Party’s bed of support. If, on the eve of the election, Georgia actually does look as though it’s tilting toward Kerry — it’s at that point in time that Bush is probably stuck doing what Walter Mondale did at the end of his campaign: ignore his presidential campaign per se and fight for some Senate seats — then we’d be seeing him up in Alaska in that tight Senate race.

Beyond the Southern states, we have the spector of various state party apparatuses dusting themselves off:

The decayed Democratic Party of Colorado is coming back from the ashes.

The decayed Democratic Party of Ohio, they say, has to get its electoral votes to Kerry or risk the emergance of a gubernatorial run from one Jerry Springer.

Meanwhile, the Illinois Republican Party has become unhinged.

On the other side, Minnesota — the formerly solidly Democratic state that brought us Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale — and for that matter Paul Wellstone — heck, for that matter Al Franken — is these days a toss-up state. The upper mid-west states look more hospitable toward Republicanism than they once did.

Demographic changes shift the states in one direction or the other. The map is being reshaped. Karl Rove’s fantasy that the 2004 election would bring with it a 20-year Republican hegenomy has completely and utterly been destroyed.

I do not know if the writers of The Emerging Democratic Majority are correct or not (in no small part because I’ve not read the book, and really only have the broadest awareness of the thesis and few of the details. I suspect I’d chunk it as moving statistics around to fulfill wishful thinking.). But, there are some things worth noting.

If John Kerry wins the election, it will be the fourth straight election where the Democrats have won the majority of the popular vote. And somewhat worth noting: Bush I won running on a platform of a “kinder, gentler” Reaganism. Bush II was a “Compassionate Conservative”.

For most of the 2000 campaign, I had the general sense that Bush would win… when I saw Gore win Florida, I was somewhat stunned and taken aback. I now suspect that my general surprise of Gore’s electability came from the fact that the RNC has louder megaphones than the DNC. Worth noting, Gore only picked up momentum after he picked up some generic “populist” rhetoric… a departure from Clinton’s “New Democratic” Centrism. (Clinton thus becomes a part of the Republican’s ruling Majority, similar to Eisenhower’s placement in the middle of the Democrat’s ruling Majority of 1932 – 1968. In a sense, he was nothing but a “Reagan Democrat” — the rise of Newt Gingrich and Clinton’s subsequent re-election campaign of “Triangulation” being the final nail in the coffin to this position.)

I’d place the disintegration of the Republican Coalition as starting in 1998 — during the Lewinsky Affair. Toss out the muddled presidential election in 2000 and look at the other races — if these were mid-term elections, the results would have been considered a Democratic Year.

2002 becomes an abberation. Hell — the conventional wisdom for 2002 even up to snuff with the reality of 2002. Had Wellstone not crashed in that plane, he probably would have pulled neighboring Missouria’s close race to the Democratic side and all we’d have is one Democratic pick-up in Arkansas and one Republican pick-up in Georgia… one state’s sex scandal and one state’s Republican trend-line.

On the other hand, this macro-cosmic frame for American political history tends to gloss over reality.

The old Democratic Coalition was borne when the public quite understandably tossed out the mixture of laissez fare and crony capitalism favoured by the previous Republican trio of Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover. But, the party adapted to changing dynamics. Roosevelt largely ended up adopting much of the Socialist Party’s platform — in a real sense, necessary to fend off a public longing for an American version of the Bolshevik Revolution or something similar. You can probably compare some of Roosevelt’s political speeches to those of Hugo Chavez’s. But, between this high-point of 1936 and 1940 — a court-packing scandal pulled the man down a notch, and the opposition party became a little smarter — Al Landon gave way to Wendell Wilkie. 1944, the US at war, Roosevelt considered sticking Wendell Wilkie on the ticket — “National Unity” ticket, if you will, with the man who pretty well compromised away the Republican Party’s isolationist sentiment anyway. Picking his running-mate at that point in his tenure was tountamount to picking his successor. The party demanded Henry Wallace’s head, and gave us Harry Truman. Henry Wallace was essentially purged from the party — and Truman would later do what has come to be known as a “Sister Soljuah” with Wallace supporters. The move from Wallace to Truman marks a significant step rightward for the Democratic Party.

Truman’s 1948 victory looks like an abberation. We forget, in our historical placement of him into the “Canon of Great Presidents”, that Truman was an unpopular president. He won through psychological voo-doo: playing up the tropes of the underdog and the “Fighter”. Thomas Dewey’s campaigning was the political equivalent of the “Prevent Defense”. (for non-football fans: a conservative defensive strategy played when your team is ahead with the philosphy that it doesn’t matter how many yards you give up, just keep the team out of the end-zone. What happens with great frequency is that the down-team gets large chunks of yards, gets close to the end-zone, and gets a touch-down.)

Eisenhower won in 1952, and again in 1956. The Democratic Party selected John F Kennedy, as a step to the right from his predecessors, who only squeaked by Nixon in 1960 with the help of the key constituency of Dead People in Illinois and Texas. Lyndon Johnson’s electoral landslide in 1964 came off of the glow of JFK’s death.

Richard Nixon rushed in in 1968. He defeated McGovern in 1972. So, what you have here is a race where one of the participants was a crooked, cynical, power-hungry madman. The Democrats have been apologizing for their candidate ever since.

Jimmy Carter’s 1976 win can only be considered an abberation. Note that Gerald Ford came within Mississippi of actually winning the thing. The man who pardoned Nixon. And fell down a lot, making him a laughingstock. During a low-point for Republican Party. Nearly won.

So, you see, the Republican’s Ruling Majority Coalition — in spirit at least — stretches back to 1948.

On the other hand, give me 50 years and I’ll probably be able to formulate a cockamine theory that a Democratic Coalition was borne with Richard Nixon. He was America’s last liberal president, after all…

———-

UPDATE: Georgia: Bush: 54% Kerry: 38%. I suspected as much, anyway, as I said in this post.

Here’s the Muslims for Bush website.

On the front page, you see lots of pictures of Bush — George and/or Laura, standing next to Muslim Americans.

And you see several “Breaking News” items alerting to the world that Kerry only wants to do away with part of it. Moving to another page, I see an apologetic toward Bush — this organization opposes the Patriot Act (difficult to stay credible toward a Muslim crowd with full frontal support, I’d wager), but Kerry is being disingenuous with his stand. Or something to that effect.

Actually, try the Mission Page. Afghanistan. Iraq. Patriot Act. Pakistani Relations (that one is a bit disingenuous…) Okay… fine. But what’s this?

“BUSH LOVES MUSLIMS”!!

The whole site is peppered by quotes of Bush saying how much he loves Muslims. All over the place! This proponent of the site is the greatest content generator for the site.

Never mind, though. Let’s take a peek at the overall polling data for Muslim Americans:

Of the nearly 1,200 Muslim voters surveyed in June by the Council for American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), 55 percent said they had voted for Bush in 2000, but only 3 percent of those same voters would vote to re-elect him.

exit polls in the 2000 election indicated that Bush carried between 70 percent and 80 percent of the Muslim vote.