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Ending the Fantasy
By Eleanor Clift
Newsweek
Saturday 29 October 2004
It's hard to game the election with all the conflicting polls. But the signs are pointing to a big turnout and a Kerry win.
Bush pollster Matthew Dowd, unshaven and looking weary, met with print journalists Thursday for one last spin session. For the record, he thinks the president will win, but he sounded so unconvincing that halfway through thehour long lunch, a reporter said, "OK, so the race is very close and one or the other will win."
When the laughter subsided, Dowd remembered his talking points and said a bit sheepishly, "The lead [of the story you ought to write] is that the election is very close and President Bush is going to win."
Asked to name John Kerry's biggest mistake, Dowd cited the Democratic National Convention where Kerry left himself vulnerable to GOP caricatures by not talking about his Senate career in a positive way. But that was last summer's talking point and Dowd quickly caught himself. Kerry's biggest mistake, Dowd said, warming to the subject, could turn out to be jumping on the story of the missing 380 tons of deadly explosives out of Iraq.
Bush says Kerry rushed to judgment before he had all the facts on this issue. This is from a president who rushed to war before he had all the facts. Bush is like a pyromaniac who returns to the scene of the crime. This is his fiasco, and it's smart for Kerry to hold Bush accountable. The failure to guard the aptly named Al Qaqaa is emblematic of everything Bush is doing wrong. The administration clearly didn't send enough troops, and now 380 tons of the most dangerous munitions are out there for possible use against U.S. troops.
The Bush team's response is also emblematic. First, they deny a charge that is undeniably true, that they went into Iraq with insufficient forces. Second, they slime the person telling the truth. Kerry wasn't faulting U.S. troops for not finding and securing the missing weapons, as Bush asserted. Kerry was attacking the chicken-hawk civilians who brushed aside pleas from the military for more manpower. Third, Bush falls back on the tried and true, pointing to evidence of a cache of deadly explosives to say this proves Saddam really was dangerous. It's still heresy to say it, but Americans were safer when Saddam was in power. He guarded his high-grade-weapons sites, and just days before the U.S. invasion, the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency had monitored the site, warning the Bush administration about the potential danger.
Bush is running against the headlines and no amount of spin can make the bad news out of Iraq look good. "He has his finger in the dyke with Iraq, and there was a little leakage this week," says Marshall Wittmann, a senior fellow with the centrist Democratic Leadership Council. In addition to the revelation about the explosives, Bush's good friend, Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, accused U.S. forces of willful neglect in the deaths of dozens of newly trained Iraqi soldiers gunned down as they traveled in an unarmed and unguarded convoy. Then word leaked that the White House would ask Congress after the election for $70 billion more for Iraq, upping the cost of the war to $225 billion.
Defending Bush is getting harder, but that doesn't deter the diehards. Conservative talk-show hosts were pushing the theory that Russian trucks hauled the missing explosives to Syria before the war. "And that's the good news: that it's not in the hands of insurgents in Iraq, it's in the hands of terrorists in Syria," says Wittmann, laughing at the absurdity of the claim. In an effort to throw Bush a lifeline, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani went on the "Today" show and said what Bush had wrongly accused Kerry of saying-that failure to find and secure the weapons was the troops' fault. "No matter how you try to blame it on the president, the actual responsibility for it really would be with the troops that were there," said Giuliani. "Did they search carefully enough? Didn't they search carefully enough?"
It's hard to game the election with all the conflicting polls, but my prediction is that it will break at the last minute for Kerry. With more than two thirds of the undecided voters saying the country is on the wrong track, Kerry should win. Bush got 47.9 percent of the vote in 2000, and that's where he is stuck today. A record voter turnout is expected, and that signals change, not four more years of the status quo.
The story that broke late Thursday about the Bush campaign using a doctored photo in an ad should help drive home Kerry's message in the final days. The image used is reminiscent of Bush's parading on an aircraft carrier flight deck to declare major combat operations over in Iraq. Here he stands as the commander in chief before cheering troops, except on close examination, the same faces are repeated over and over in the crowd. The ad uses troops as props and manipulates the scene to create a Hollywood computer-generated picture of a war president. Kerry spokesman Joe Lockhart issued a statement demanding that the Bush campaign pull the ad, saying, "Now we know why this ad is named, 'Whatever it takes'."
The White House has spent four years creating a fantasy world around Bush. Win or lose on Tuesday, the mistakes Bush has made in Iraq have caught up with him.
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By Eleanor Clift
Newsweek
Saturday 29 October 2004
It's hard to game the election with all the conflicting polls. But the signs are pointing to a big turnout and a Kerry win.
Bush pollster Matthew Dowd, unshaven and looking weary, met with print journalists Thursday for one last spin session. For the record, he thinks the president will win, but he sounded so unconvincing that halfway through thehour long lunch, a reporter said, "OK, so the race is very close and one or the other will win."
When the laughter subsided, Dowd remembered his talking points and said a bit sheepishly, "The lead [of the story you ought to write] is that the election is very close and President Bush is going to win."
Asked to name John Kerry's biggest mistake, Dowd cited the Democratic National Convention where Kerry left himself vulnerable to GOP caricatures by not talking about his Senate career in a positive way. But that was last summer's talking point and Dowd quickly caught himself. Kerry's biggest mistake, Dowd said, warming to the subject, could turn out to be jumping on the story of the missing 380 tons of deadly explosives out of Iraq.
Bush says Kerry rushed to judgment before he had all the facts on this issue. This is from a president who rushed to war before he had all the facts. Bush is like a pyromaniac who returns to the scene of the crime. This is his fiasco, and it's smart for Kerry to hold Bush accountable. The failure to guard the aptly named Al Qaqaa is emblematic of everything Bush is doing wrong. The administration clearly didn't send enough troops, and now 380 tons of the most dangerous munitions are out there for possible use against U.S. troops.
The Bush team's response is also emblematic. First, they deny a charge that is undeniably true, that they went into Iraq with insufficient forces. Second, they slime the person telling the truth. Kerry wasn't faulting U.S. troops for not finding and securing the missing weapons, as Bush asserted. Kerry was attacking the chicken-hawk civilians who brushed aside pleas from the military for more manpower. Third, Bush falls back on the tried and true, pointing to evidence of a cache of deadly explosives to say this proves Saddam really was dangerous. It's still heresy to say it, but Americans were safer when Saddam was in power. He guarded his high-grade-weapons sites, and just days before the U.S. invasion, the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency had monitored the site, warning the Bush administration about the potential danger.
Bush is running against the headlines and no amount of spin can make the bad news out of Iraq look good. "He has his finger in the dyke with Iraq, and there was a little leakage this week," says Marshall Wittmann, a senior fellow with the centrist Democratic Leadership Council. In addition to the revelation about the explosives, Bush's good friend, Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, accused U.S. forces of willful neglect in the deaths of dozens of newly trained Iraqi soldiers gunned down as they traveled in an unarmed and unguarded convoy. Then word leaked that the White House would ask Congress after the election for $70 billion more for Iraq, upping the cost of the war to $225 billion.
Defending Bush is getting harder, but that doesn't deter the diehards. Conservative talk-show hosts were pushing the theory that Russian trucks hauled the missing explosives to Syria before the war. "And that's the good news: that it's not in the hands of insurgents in Iraq, it's in the hands of terrorists in Syria," says Wittmann, laughing at the absurdity of the claim. In an effort to throw Bush a lifeline, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani went on the "Today" show and said what Bush had wrongly accused Kerry of saying-that failure to find and secure the weapons was the troops' fault. "No matter how you try to blame it on the president, the actual responsibility for it really would be with the troops that were there," said Giuliani. "Did they search carefully enough? Didn't they search carefully enough?"
It's hard to game the election with all the conflicting polls, but my prediction is that it will break at the last minute for Kerry. With more than two thirds of the undecided voters saying the country is on the wrong track, Kerry should win. Bush got 47.9 percent of the vote in 2000, and that's where he is stuck today. A record voter turnout is expected, and that signals change, not four more years of the status quo.
The story that broke late Thursday about the Bush campaign using a doctored photo in an ad should help drive home Kerry's message in the final days. The image used is reminiscent of Bush's parading on an aircraft carrier flight deck to declare major combat operations over in Iraq. Here he stands as the commander in chief before cheering troops, except on close examination, the same faces are repeated over and over in the crowd. The ad uses troops as props and manipulates the scene to create a Hollywood computer-generated picture of a war president. Kerry spokesman Joe Lockhart issued a statement demanding that the Bush campaign pull the ad, saying, "Now we know why this ad is named, 'Whatever it takes'."
The White House has spent four years creating a fantasy world around Bush. Win or lose on Tuesday, the mistakes Bush has made in Iraq have caught up with him.
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