Re: Rove's spin

Rove knows that any hope of the Administration regaining its political viability is over. All that remains is for him to attempt to affect the Bush legacy through revisionist distortion.

Rove is a cheat. Cheaters win for a time but then they get kicked out of the game.

The'publican party will only regain their moral stature when they distance themselves from both the monetary corruption involved in Rove's Iraq and the political corruption he has imported into all branches of our government.

Stewieeeee, I hope you are aware that the number one rogue nation in the world, by a big margin, is our country, the USA. Other countries would be equally demanding of preconditions before meeting with a US president, or at least before meeting with Bush.

In case anyone is forgetting, diplomacy is a process where representatives of nations talk about their problems and differences, trying to seek solutions and middle grounds. When you take discussions off the table you are saying no to diplomacy. That isn't the way to world peace.

Hoppy in Sacramento

Yeah. Leadership, Fred. From the NYT article (and this is coming from a guy who started a popular Fred Thompson website):

“This support should be nurtured, not pushed aside and asked to stand-by forever,” Mr. Harper said. “Enough with the ambiguities. Enough with those around you being more decisive than you are. Let’s hear it, Fred.”

I always thought John Kerry would have done much better in the last election (as in, won by an unassailable margin) if he had simply announced his cabinet picks in advance (Secretaries of State and Defense would have been enough). No matter what people thought of president Bush, it would have been nearly impossible to do worse than Bush's cabinet. It's implied in the process that you're voting for a team. Kerry would have won if he'd let us know in advance who his team was going to be.

Of course, the flaw in the Kerry hypothetical is that it assumes he could have actually made a decision about his cabinet. His inability to make decisions was one of the many flaws of his candidacy. In fact, his ability to do much of anything in his Senate career was probably a leading indicator of his weakness as a candidate.

Comment moved upthread. (I clicked the wrong link.)

sure. i guess "such as" could mean there are other things.

but they haven't communicated any as such.

exactly. bush says "stop building nukes" and that's a precondition that prohibits talks.

what obama has yet to make clear is that a precondition like "tighten up border security" might make sense.

when he says "such as" it's clear to me the obama people simply can not imagine a precondition that would help establish good faith between two distrusting parties.

"The Kennedy cabinet was widely viewed, I believe, as some of the best and brightest of the day."

And yet it produced some of the chief architects of the Vietnam War.

I'm sure there is still corruption lurking, but Rove is just wrong here. People voted on the war. There is a reason there was such an uproar when Bush sacked Rummy so soon after the election. I'm not saying corruption didn't cost a few votes, but it didn't swing the 2006 election, one need only look at the approval numbers now that the GOP has put a stalemate on the war in Congress/the Executive to see that.

Oh, dearie-dear. Still rewriting the English language, are we?

You know after reading that Miami Herald article the other day I'm more than willing to concede that what Obama said in the debate was not what he really meant. I'll bet if he had been out doing damage control the next morning instead of throwing tantrums and calling people names, it probably would have been a one-day story with pretty a negligible effect on the larger scheme of things.

But these endless, torturous contortions of logic and linguistics to try and make the case that what he said was not what he said, are downright painful to watch. I'm almost getting a stiff neck from watching people tying themselves up in such knots with it. The longer it goes on, the sillier and more peevish and volatile it makes him look. So you know Clinton's people are just going to keep on chumming for him as long as he keeps rising to the bait. Rolling out Vilsack even suggests a possible calculation that keeping this exchange going could help them in Iowa, where Edwards is the guy to beat.

I tend to think to think picking off Susan Collins in Maine would be a long shot at best. That 73% job approval rating of hers (the last anyone knew at least) is daunting. About the only major things in Allen's favor are the 22% support for the war in the state and the fact that Collins is marginally more conservative than Snowe. But you would have to lay an awful lot of blame for the Bush administration at her door to overcome her popularity. I guess it's probably too much to ask for the Club for Growth (or whatever their name was) to dump a bunch of money into a nasty and divisive primary challenge to soften her up a little, as they did with Chaffee.

The Open Secrets 2006 Electon Analysis agrees with Karl Rove:

"Officeholders tied to Washington scandals, however, lost in greater number Tuesday. In national exit polls, voters said corruption and ethics in government were extremely important factors in their vote, outranking (by a small margin) terrorism, the economy, Iraq and illegal immigration."

I think it would have been a good idea for the Dems to have had a Shadow Cabinet in 2002-2006 generally, done in such a way that the Cabinet members are seen as party point persons on certain policy topics, but not specifically tied to Dem members of Congress or the 2004 Dem candidates and eventual nominee.

It would have been extremely useful for getting the Dem message out, at a time when the MSM was constantly just regurgitating the GOP and Bush/Cheney administration talking points, esp. on foreign policy.

If the nominee does have a Shadow Cabinet, the campaign will then have to spend a ton of time vetting each potential person, and any past misstep that person has made will be attributed to the candidate. It would be distracting.

The same thing goes with Democratic fetishization of detailed policy prescriptions. It's just unrealistic to make every candidate put out detailed plans on every topic. We all know the plans aren't going to be adopted as written, so it ends up providing fodder for the GOP to distort and use against the Dem nominee in the general election.