Daniel Drezner is a thoughtful, and often thought-provoking, political scientist whose views tend conservative. Indeed he advised the Bush campaign in 2000, and was a political appointee at the Treasury in 2001.
So, it's some sort of statement on where we've come since 2000 that Drezner now puts his probability of voting for Kerry at 80%. No surprise there if you've been watching that probability creep up from around 1/2 through 0.6 and upwards. What was a surprise was the level of vitriol floating round the discussion, the sense that some people clearly have of catastrophic, apocalyptic things happening to the United States have if Kerry is elected.
I say this with a trace of irony, as they might say that I think apocalyptic, catastrophic things will happen if Bush is returned. Actually, no.
Firstly, I think that the catastrophic, apocalyptic stuff, while a possibility won't be as apocalyptic as the Cold War could have ended. The worst that could happen, and it would be really, really bad, is that (1) terrorists could smuggle nuclear weapons into American cities and detonate them, or (2) North Korea or Iran could send a nuclear missile into some city. Let's not be blase about this, but that would be a whole lot better than the risk during the Cold War that hundreds or thousands of nuclear weapons could have been fired in a conflict.
It's possible that the American people realize that terrorism is not the really horrible, existential, life-on-earth threat that it is sometimes made out to be, because [observation number one on the campaign] homeland security and the possibility of terrorist attacks have not played a huge role in the debate.
Terrorism's absence from the campaign is because Iraq has become something between a "sticky situation" and one of the largest strategic blunders ever made by an American president.
By their actions the Bush campaign acknowledge this. Have you heard about the domestic policy proposals Bush has for the next term? And by policy proposals I don't just mean vague platitudes about letting youngsters invest their social security plans in the stock market, I mean actual, thought-out, detailed plans. You won't find them here, and that's probably the best place to find them.
No, apparently the RNC ad-buy for the next couple of weeks is going to be focused on calling Kerry the most liberal senator ever. Is that the best they can do? I mean, there are serious, substantive disagreements you can have with the ideas Kerry has proposed. When you have to put the bogeyman puppet on and make your opponent all scary, it really is a sign of desperation.
Thus, observation two. A government that has a record to run on barely needs to mention the opposition in its campaign.
A president this weak should be staring down the barrel of a 350-190 vote electoral college crushing, but he's not. He's still in the game. He could still win. Observation three: The Democrats have been surprisingly weak at parrying these generic shots on Kerry. The Republicans were always going to portray the Democratic candidate as a flip-flopper. How hard would it have been to brainstorm some pithy response and flood the media with it.
More substantively, Kerry's position on the Iraq war needed to be reduced to an effective one or two sentences, and contrasted with Bush's. They're doing this now, but done right two months ago the election might be all but over.
And now the liberal charge. Please tell me that someone read Wesley Clark's speech laying out in a few paragraphs why the "liberal" label was a proud one to wear; that the United States would not exist were it not for people on the liberal side of the debate; that if the Republicans are going to keep referring to the war on terrorism as being like World War II they should remember it was Roosevelt who was President then.
Posted by robe0419 at October 16, 2004 4:33 PM