Posted 12:12 PM by Robert

Coping With The Overzealous

Mickey Kaus points out that John Kerry is again blaming his overzealous speechwriters for his increasingly convoluted explanation for why he mentioned Jimmy Carter and James Baker as potential Mideast envoys, something that upset mainstream Jewish organizations. The Senator also says that overzealous speechwriters sneaked all that "Benedict Arnold corporations" demagoguery into his speeches that he is now repudiating.

This overzealous speechwriters excuse is a marvelous linguistic perpetual motion machine just waiting to transform our society. For example, just as Senator Kerry is not responsible for comments inserted into his verbal emissions by overzealous speechwriters, Martha Stewart and Frank P. Quattrone would not be sent to jail for statements made to federal investigators or to their business colleagues if those "criminal" statements were inserted by overzealous speechwriters! Ms. Stewart and Mr. Quattrone surely wouldn't be responsible for acts of overzealous speechwriters if Senator Kerry isn't.

Think of the possibilities! If John Kerry can get his transformative principle established he will make Al Gore look like a piker for inventing the internet.

Posted 10:12 AM by Robert

Pathetic ... And Bound To Lose XXXIX: The Most Damning Photographic Evidence Yet

Yes, you've seen a lot of disturbing photographs recently.

But, be warned, if you haven't seen these before, it's a shock.

Posted 2:03 PM by Robert

Souter?

Former Rep. Charles G. Douglas, a Republican who served with Souter on the New Hampshire Supreme Court, said that the justice is not awkward in public but still turns down most invitations. "He'd rather read a good book," Douglas said.

Garrow said that because Souter dislikes Washington, computers and attention, a retirement in the next year is possible even though the second-youngest justice is in good health. "This is not someone who is going to die in Washington, D.C.," Garrow said.

Posted 11:56 AM by Robert

More Service Jobs

Earlier this week, the Institute for Supply Management's (ISM) survey of manufacturers showed registered 62.4 in April, down slightly from March's 62.5 but still indicating strong growth in manufacturing. But of course manufacturing is not where most of the US economy happens to be.

So the ISM is back with a U.S. service-sector report showing another record month of expansion in the service-sector for April, improving employment and rising prices:

Purchasing and supply executives report that business activity continued to increase in April in the non-manufacturing sector, and at a faster rate of increase than in March, with some indexes reaching record high values. The Business Activity Index for April is 68.4 percent. April's index indicates continued growth across almost all non-manufacturing industries.

Six more months of this to go before election day.

Posted 8:53 AM by Robert

Pathetic ... And Bound To Lose XXXVIII: Autumn Of The Candidate Presumptive

Apparently working from the theory that the best use of scarce campaign resources is to let the nuclear bomb go off and then try to put out the fire, the Kerry campaign is still not addressing the lack of minority representation in his inner circle. The Washington Times reports the most recent wave of the obviously inevitable tsunami:

Democratic strategist Donna Brazile criticized Sen. John Kerry yesterday for failing to put black and Hispanic leaders into senior campaign positions, saying it raised serious questions about his commitment to racial diversity.

Ms. Brazile just keeps impressing with her hard nosed assessments of political realities. She had previously gone public to knock the Kerry campaign's failure to take immediate action and understand that it was being defined into its grave at this very moment - although as noted here at the time her comments then had obvious application to the racial aspect of the Senator's predicament.

Her new comments appear in Roll Call and are excerpted by the Times:

"If the past is indeed prologue, this message has been lost on Sen. John Kerry's campaign, which has failed to understand how to navigate one of the most important issues in American politics: race relations and diversity."

Her surprisingly sharp criticism of the party's presumptive presidential nominee was the second major broadside hurled at the Kerry campaign in the past week by a prominent minority leader.

In a letter to Mr. Kerry last week, Raul Yzaguirre, president of the National Council of La Raza, wrote that "relegating all of your minority staff to the important but limited role of outreach only reinforces perceptions that your campaign views Hispanics as a voting constituency to be mobilized, but not as experts to be consulted in shaping policy."

"Not a single one of your senior staff is Latino. Quite frankly, we find this deeply troubling," Mr. Yzaguirre wrote, adding that that raises "questions about the seriousness of your commitment to diversity."

Does John Kerry even begin to grasp how close he is to disaster here? Perhaps he does. He has withdrawn from the brink of extinction before, rising from his coffin to take Iowa and New Hampshire. Perhaps even now he is moving about one of the many palaces provided by the grace of his wife's vast inherited fortune, concocting some scheme to set things right, muttering, as Gabriel García Marquez's patriarch did so often before his final descent, "What a mess. What a mess."

But it's beginning to look more like over the weekend the vultures got into the presidential campaign.

UPDATE:

From Boston Magazine:

So it was with considerable surprise bordering on shock that Payne watched over the next month as the Kerry corpse lurched out of its coffin and tromped all over the competition en route to the most miraculous political comeback in presidential primary history. "I thought he was dead meat," Payne recalls now. .... "He's a guy who doesn't really start to pay attention until he thinks he may be in danger of dying," says Payne, who identifies classic early Kerry campaign symptoms: "Delays, inattention to details, sloppy staff work, not having a tight message. He'll allow this to just go on and on until someone hands him a poll and says, 'You'd better get it together.'"

And then no doubt he starts muttering: What a mess, what a mess. Where have we seen this before?

Thanks to Mickey Kaus for the hard-to-find (for me) internet link to the Boston Magazine artcile alluded to above.

Posted 9:20 AM by Robert

About That Clinton "Surplus"

David Brooks today repeats one of the more curious Democratic exaggerations:

While Ted Kennedy's people still dominate the organizational and rhetorical parts of the campaign, the policy shop has been turned over to the Rubinites — the superintelligent Clinton administration alumni who, if they were a little more demonstrative, would gather at mass rallies waving Robert Rubin's little blue books of fiscal rectitude and chanting the inspiring slogans that spread frenzy in the bond markets: "Cut the Deficits! Lower Rates! Cut the Deficits! Lower Rates!"

The federal budgets of the later Clinton years - like the California budgets of those same years - were flushed with proceeds from taxes on sales of hugely inflated stocks resulting from the ill considered internet-dotcom "boom." That ersatz "boom" occurred on Mr. Rubin's watch - and made many of his Wall Street community rich, including the freshly and imprudently convicted Frank P. Quattrone, but represented a serious wrong turn in the direction of investment in this country.

Posted 10:42 PM by Robert

Pathetic ... And Bound To Lose XXXVII: "My Life," By John Kerry

From the New York Times on John Kerry's $27 Million advertising buy to "introduce himself" to American voters:

In one advertisement, Mr. Kerry explains that he joined the Navy after college in 1966 because "I thought it was important, if you had a lot of privileges as I had, to go to a great university like Yale, to give something back to your country."

Some Democratic strategists said they were intrigued to see both advertisements emphasize Yale, which would call attention to Mr. Kerry's image as an intellectual. One senior Kerry strategist said that because Mr. Kerry saw his elite education as impelling him to serve in the military, "the baggage you might think would come with it doesn't exist."

Those Democratic strategists might better spend their time being intrigued that Mr. Kerry explains that he joined the Navy after college in 1966 because "I thought it was important, if you had a lot of privileges as I had, to go to a great university like Yale, to give something back to your country," where he actually had no choice but to go into the military (or seek consciencious objector status, flee the country or the like) since his draft board had just turned down his request for an extension of his deferment to allow him to study in Paris.

Don't those Democratic strategists see any risk in Senator Kerry blatantly misrepresenting his reasons for joining the Navy - and making a big $27 Million deal out of it on television?

UPDATE: An astute reader e-mails:

Kerry never, repeat never, volunteered for combat. As most college age men knew at thet time, enlisting in the Navy was a safe alternative to being drafted into the Army. When he volunteered for Swift Boat duty, it was blockade duty, not heavy combat. He got into combat because only because the rules of engagement were changed by Admiral Zumwalt when he began operation Sealords. Once Kerry was in combat, he gamed the system to get out of it as quickly as possible.

Isn't this a job for some 527 committee ads? What would be wrong with an ad just laying out the facts. Something like this:

After Yale, Mr. Kerry sought more time in Paris but was faced with the draft. Instead of being drafted into the Army he chose the Navy. He sought Swift-boat service, which, at the time, did not involve much combat risk. But he was surprised when Admiral Zumwalt changed the Swift boat's mission, and ended up in combat. He sought early removal from combat, was successful in obtaining his transfer because his three purple hearts technically allowed that - although the wounds for which he won those medals were minor - and served less time than many. He showed courage in action. He has misrepresented much of his history in his advertisements and public statements.

Wouldn't that make a nice, independently produced 527 ad? Maybe by a veterans group? Maybe with some interview footage of other Vietnam veterans? Here's a nice voice-over, to be read by the author himself: "John Kerry and I served much of our time, a full 12 months in my case and a controversial four months in his, commanding the exact same six-man boat, PCF-94, which I took over after he requested early departure. Despite our shared experience, I still believe what I believed 33 years ago--that John Kerry slandered America's military by inventing or repeating grossly exaggerated claims of atrocities and war crimes in order to advance his own political career as an antiwar activist."

Of course, such an ad would have more effect if more voters first heard the Kerry version of his history. That sequencing would maximize the sense that Senator Kerry can't be trusted. Which may explain why we haven't seen such an ad ---- just yet.

Maybe in October?

Posted 3:03 PM by Robert

The Times, They Are A-Changin' ...

... and, in Wisconsin, they seem to be a-changin' really fast:

University of Wisconsin/Capital Times/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Badger Poll. April 20-28, 2004. N=511 adults statewide. MoE ± 4:

Bush...............Kerry...............Nader...............Other/None.........Don't Know
50%...............38%............... 6%........................ 1%....................... 4%

St. Norbert College/Wisconsin Public Radio Wisconsin Survey. April 14-21, 2004. N=402 adults statewide. MoE ± 5 (total sample):

....................Bush...............Kerry.......................Nader...............Unsure

ALL............... 40%................... 46%................... 8%............... 5%
Likely voters..43%....................48%................... 7.................. 2

Of course, voter preferences don't really change that fast.

Do they?

Posted 10:39 AM by Robert

April Showers

William Safire opens his current column about the prospect for democracy in Iraq with a despairing snip from T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land: "April is the cruelest month." But the column is actually more sensibly optimistic than that, and soon phases into a more optimistic message: However, a certain grim logic suggests a turn for the better may be coming this summer.

Safire's optimism is a jewel held to the light. No new democracy has ever sprouted and bloomed painlessly - or at least as painlessly as the mainstream media and, say, much of Europe, are implicitly demanding before advocating abandonment of the Iraqi people to despotism.

So it strikes me that the cite to Elliot is not quite right. It's progenitor line would have better served. "April ... month" is a beautiful allusion of the opening lines of Chaucer"s Canterbury Tales (1400): "Whanne that Aprille with his shoures soote." Chaucer celebrates the return of spring and its refreshing but bothersome rains, rains needed to restore vigorous life to roots and to engender a new cycle of natural fertility. Eliot's "waste land" offers little hope of new life - even the early spring rains bring only "a little life" in the "dull roofs" and "dried tubers."

In other words: "April showers bring ..."

Posted 8:43 AM by Robert

Pathetic ... And Bound To Lose XXXVI: More Winning Through Nuance! (Or, Where Did All The "Outsourcing" Go?)

The Man Without Qualities has been unfair to John Kerry by not noting that he has been crystal clear in at least one important area of the campaign, outsourcing:

The practice of moving work out of the country to reduce production costs, often called outsourcing, has become an enormous political issue in an election year. John Kerry, the presumed Democratic presidential nominee, has been blunt in his criticism of outsourcing. "We're going to shut down any incentive, any reward or any kind of benefit for any Benedict Arnold company or CEO that takes American jobs overseas and sticks the American people with the bill," Kerry has said.

Well, that seems pretty clear-cut and lacking in nuance. Surely I owe the Senator an apology. So does Rich Lowry.

But I suppose that was long ago and in another country and, besides, the interest group of the moment is different - because the Wall Street Journal tells us this morning that John Kerry says he is actually not opposed to "outsourcing," and, in fact, he defends it:

He defends the right of corporations to outsource jobs outside the U.S. despite rising public anxiety. ... Yet Mr. Kerry also knows he faces skepticism in the business community, where there are worries about his aggressive environmentalism and bruises from his primary-season references to "Benedict Arnold CEOs" -- a line he used to criticize those who took advantage of overseas tax shelters. When Mr. Kerry walked into a private meeting with 60 top executives in Washington's St. Regis Hotel last month, for instance, Pfizer Inc. Chairman Henry McKinnell greeted him by observing, "Senator, I want you to know there are no Benedict Arnold companies here," as Mr. Kerry recalls. The senator says he explained that he meant to criticize only executives who seek to manipulate their tax liability by nominally shifting corporate headquarters, or even their citizenship, abroad.

Hooooooooo-boy! And if the Pfizer Chairman bought that one I've got a bridge over the East River that I'm sure he'll want to have Pfizer snap up now - before interest rates go up.

But perhaps the most interesting thing about Senator Kerry's latest whopping lie - er, I mean, "nuanced refinement" - is the extent to which this most recent and bizarre flip-flop indicates how quickly the "outsourcing" issue has died as a hot issue in this campaign. Funny how that often happens when the real economic structure of free trade consequences starts to get examined in a little more detail than the demagogues prefer. Was it the studies showing that the US has lots more hi-tech "insourcing" than "outsourcing?" Or maybe it was the latest survey from the Institute of Supply Management (ISM), showing economic activity in the manufacturing sector growing in April for the 11th consecutive month, while the overall economy grew for the 30th consecutive month and the ISM manufacturing employment index grew for the sixth consecutive month.

There are so many possibilities!

UPDATE: The same Wall Street Journal puff piece repeats the claim that Senator Kerry "helped found a Boston cookie company that still survives, and he invokes his background as an entrepreneur."

But in today's edition of "OpinionJounal's Political Diary" John Fund reveals that not only did John Kerry steal the cookie business he supposedly founded, but he then later tried to sell it back to the person he stole it from.

Don Luskin has more of the story.

There really seems to be no bottom to John Kerry's baloney reserve.

FURTHER UPDATE: Kausfiles has lots of good musings about Kerry outsourcing baloney, including lots of links to other commenters pulling their jaws off their desks.

Posted 12:24 AM by Robert

Pathetic ... And Bound To Lose XXXV: Lots of Latino Voters May Say Hasta La Vista, Senor Kerry!

Even the Los Angeles Times is beginning to understand that Senator Kerry is very, very weak with latino voters:

So far, it's an uneven fight. Two months after John F. Kerry in effect captured the Democratic presidential nomination, the Massachusetts senator has no staff or headquarters in New Mexico, the nation's most heavily Latino state. In each of the three other battleground states where the Latino vote is pivotal - Arizona, Nevada and Florida - the same is true: Bush has staff and headquarters; Kerry does not. Bush also has run television ads in Spanish in each of those states; Kerry has not.

[Bill] Richardson said the Kerry campaign was "doing fine now" on appeals to Latinos and that they view Republicans as "anti-immigrant, anti-education, anti-civil rights." But he warned: "The danger is President Bush does have personal popularity with Latino voters." Gutierrez, a former Democratic National Committee ad maker, said ... "[John Kerry] is still going to have to be sold to the Hispanic community as John Kerry ... In the absence of having a clear and compelling reason to vote for John Kerry, [latino voters] are just going to stay home." .... The biggest- and fastest-growing minority group in the U.S., Latinos lean heavily toward Democrats, but are less firmly anchored to the party than African Americans. In 2000, Latinos comprised 7% of the national vote, favoring Gore over Bush, 61% to 38%, a Los Angeles Times exit poll found.

Still, Bush's performance among Latinos in 2000 was the strongest of any Republican presidential nominee since Ronald Reagan won 46% in 1984. As governor of Texas in the 1990s, Bush courted Latinos aggressively, and he has continued to do so as president. .... This year, Lionel Sosa, the producer of Bush's Spanish-language television ads, said the president's team was aiming for 40% of the Latino vote - a mark that strategists of both parties said probably would ensure Bush's reelection.

We may set aside Mr. Richardson's whistle past the graveyard (sure, the Kerry campaign is "doing fine now" - it's election day Mr. Richardson is worried about). Indeed, all of Mr. Richardson's comments in this article may just be plugs for himself as Mr. Kerry's vice-presidential choice . But his comment about "the danger" being that President Bush has personal popularity with Latino voters is passing strange - especially if the comment is taken relatively, with respect to John Kerry. With exactly which type of voter does Senator Kerry enjoy "personal popularity?" Surely no sensible person of any political persuasion thinks that John Kerry will receive more than a handful of votes in the coming election because voters actually like him as a person.

Even juxtaposing thoughts like "personal popularity" and "John Kerry" is disturbing.

Posted 10:49 AM by Robert

One Every Minute

Consumers want to save money on groceries and, all things being equal, buy them at the cheapest supplier. Increasingly, that is not a traditional supermarket but a Walmart or other "discounter." The money saved can go somewhere else - into extra gasoline, for example. In other words, the headline capturing what's happening in this area of retail is:

Benefits To Consumers Of Discount Grocery Retailers Cushion Effects Of Rising Prices Elsewhere!

But that's not the spin provided by the Food Marketing Institute with the helpful assist of the ever-gullible Associated Press:

For financially pressed consumers, it's coming down to a choice between spending on gasoline or groceries, and gasoline is winning, a food industry analysis finds. "Given the economic environment, it is not surprising that more shoppers are buying food today in discount stores and other low-price venues than ever before," said the report by the Food Marketing Institute, released at the organization's annual trade show in Chicago.

Does anyone think that if gas prices go down again that consumers will return in droves to supermarkets charging more for groceries than the Walmart down the street? Of course not. It's not the rise in gas prices that are attracting consumers to Walmart and "discounters" - it's the low prices. And that's not gong to change with a decline in gas prices.

Could it be that the nasty spin placed on declining grocery prices is attributable to something the AP completely fails to note: The FMI is an organ of what is mostly a trade organization of food retailers and wholesalers, the very companies that are being squeezed as the "discounters" get groceries to consumers more cheaply. As the organization's website explains:

The Food Marketing Institute (FMI) conducts programs in research, education, industry relations and public affairs on behalf of its 2,300 member companies - food retailers and wholesalers - in the United States and around the world. FMI’s U.S. members operate approximately 26,000 retail food stores with a combined annual sales volume of $340 billion — three-quarters of all food retail store sales in the United States. FMI's retail membership is composed of large multi-store chains, regional firms and independent supermarkets. Its international membership includes 200 companies from 60 countries.

If he were alive today, PT Barnum might observe that a sucker seems to join the AP as a reporter every minute.