John Kerry and Colin Powell

This is another plug for my favorite website, www.consortiumnews.com. The site currently features a brilliant piece by Robert Parry analyzing the career of Colin Powell. I will not try to summarize Parry's article; the title of the piece, "Colin Powell: Failed Opportunist," pretty much says it all about Parry's conclusions. Suffice to say, the article is comprehensive and devastating in its dissection of Powell's highly-fictionalized public persona.

What I found most striking in Parry's article is the following observation:

"Another amazing aspect of Powell's life story was his Forrest Gump-like quality to show up in frame after frame in turning-point moments in recent American history, except in Powell's case, he almost never did the right thing."

Parry describes Powell's role in so many of the crucial events of our times, a role that invariably placed Powell on the wrong side of the issue. In Vietnam, Powell had an opportunity to bring about the early disclosure of the My Lai massacre; instead he covered it up. He was in on the ground floor of the Iran-Contra affair; instead of blowing the whistle, he covered up for superiors such as Caspar Weinberger. He was heavily involved in the Central American policies of the Reagan Administration; he covered up atrocities committed by American allies. He had an opportunity to minimize some of the carnage perpetrated against Iraqis in the first Gulf War; instead he double-crossed Gen. Schwarzkopf (who sought to avoid a ground war in Iraq) in order to curry favor with the hawkish zeitgeist of the first Bush Administration. And, as we all know most recently, he had an opportunity to take a stand against the current disastrous policies in Iraq; instead he legitimized Bush's actions by presenting fabricated evidence to the UN, either knowingly or at best in reckless disregard for the truth.

What is most striking about this catalogue of Powell's consistent pattern of placing personal advancement before doing the right thing, is the fact that John Kerry was very much on the scene during the same crucial junctures in recent history. And how differently did Kerry behave! Instead of sweeping Vietnam atrocities under the rug, as Powell persistently tried to do, Kerry courageously came home and told the truth; that courage came back to haunt him in this campaign. As previously described in this blog, Kerry was in the forefront in alerting the public to the lawlessness of the Reagan Administration's Central America policies and was among the first to unravel the facts of the Iran-Contra affair. Kerry took a courageous stand against the necessity of the first Gulf War, another act of courage that cost him in this election. And as I have also described in previous blogs, Kerry consistently pressed for a rational policy in the current Iraq debacle, a reasoned approach that merely subjected him to derision by the Republicans and their media allies as a "flip flopper."

More than anything else, this recent election fills me with sadness -- even more sadness than anger. What an opportunity America squandered! We had a chance to select a truly great President, a man who consistently stood for what was right throughout all of the turning points of our recent history. Instead, we are the mercy of shallow opportunists.

Respecting Red State Culture

There has been a lot of breast beating among Democrats and liberal pundits about how the Democratic Party needs to show more respect to the faith-based culture of the alleged "majority" of Americans living in Red States. Apparently, the problem is that we Blue Staters are just pointy-headed elitists who think that everyone who is a fundamentalist Bush voter is a nitwit. We Blue State Democrats are told that even if we disagree with these folks, we should still respect their culture.

Okay, so let's venture out into the Big Red Morass and find out what it is that we're supposed to be respecting. Indeed, I recently realized how clueless I am about Red State culture when I found out that I knew almost nothing about the miracle of the Virgin Mary in the 10-year old grilled cheese sandwich. It seems that ten years ago a woman in Hollywood, Florida took a bite out of her sandwich only to discover the visage of the Blessed Virgin grinning back at her. This caused the woman to stop eating (I don't know if she prepared an alternative meal) and to wrap the Miraculous Munchie in cotton balls and place it in a clear plastic container which she has kept by her bedside ever since. Note: I have seen the size of Floridian cockroaches, so this woman must have been engaged in one hell of a battle to maintain the integrity of this sandwich over the past ten years. According to the woman, the sandwich has enabled her to win over $70,000 at casinos -- just imagine what this sandwich could do with a privatized Social Security account! The sandwich has just been auctioned off for a lot of dough on e-bay.

Respect that, you Blue State elitists! I guess that we should all be thankful under these circumstances that we didn't do any worse than George W. Bush.

Crunching The Numbers

I am still trying to figure out what to write about the "where do we go from here?" sort of question. Looking at liberal blogs and listening to Democratic pundits suggests that there are two main schools of thought shaping up on that issue: (1) the DLC-types are suggesting a move to the "Center" (echoed by columnists such as Nicholas Kristof) so that the Democratic Party can make itself more palatable to right-wing voters, including the Religious Right; and (2) many bloggers are arguing that the Democrats need to adopt a more aggressive anti-corporate stance so that they can shed the image of "liberal elitists" and appeal to working-class voters on economic populist grounds in order to overcome the influence of religious fundamentalism (the view set forth cogently by Thomas Frank in his book, What's The Matter With Kansas). My own inclination is that both of these views are wrong, but I'm still thinking that through, and will undoubtedly be explaining my thinking in a future blog.

However, before we start talking about where we are going, we first have to figure out where we are, and that requires a careful analysis of the election results. From a purely scientific point of view, I have been perturbed by the election results. As readers of this blog may recall, I promoted the theory that few Gore voters were likely to switch over to Bush this time, and since Gore got more votes than Bush, Kerry would therefore win the election. Was my analysis wrong?

The answer seems to be, yes and no. Obviously I was wrong in predicting that Kerry would win, but I appear to have been right that there would not be a significant cross-over of Gore voters to Bush. Kerry actually improved upon Gore's total by more than 4.5 million votes (50,999,897 for Gore vs. 55,554,359 for Kerry); even assuming that all 2.5 million voters who abandoned Nader this time went to Kerry (probably a safe assumption), that still means that Kerry attracted more than 2 million additional voters to the Democratic ticket while still holding on to all of Gore's vote.

What is truly remarkable about the 2004 election results was not the inadequacy of Kerry's vote-drawing ability, but rather, the massive increase in Bush's total, which apparently did not come at the expense of the Democrats, again since Kerry's vote total substantially improved upon Gore's. Bush increased his vote total by approximately 8.7 million votes (50,456,002 in 2000 vs. 59,108,773 in 2004), thus transforming a 500,000 vote shortfall in 2000 into a 3.6 million vote margin of victory this time.

These results make the 2004 election unprecedented in recent history, in that both parties increased their vote totals over the prior election. That is, while vote gains such as Bush's are not unprecedented, they invariably result from shifts of voters away from the other party (or sometimes, away from a third party). For example, Johnson's 1964 total exceeded Kennedy's 1960 total by 9 million votes, but Goldwater's 1964 total was 7 million votes less than Nixon's 1960 total; Nixon got 15 million more votes in 1972 than he got in 1968 (including approximately 10 million Wallace votes) while McGovern got approximately 2 million less than Humphrey got (an anomalous election because the voting age was lowered from 21 to 18 between 1968 and 1972); Reagan got almost 5 million more votes in 1980 than Ford got in 1976, but Carter got almost 4 million less votes in 1980 than he got in 1976; Clinton got 3 million more votes in 1992 than Dukakis got in 1988, but Bush Sr. got almost 9 million votes less. Unlike all of these past elections, Bush increased his total by almost 9 million votes, even though Kerry also exceeded the Gore+Nader total by more than 2 million votes.

Thus, the real mystery of this election is where did these roughly 9 million additional Bush votes come from? The conventional wisdom would be that they are evangelical Christians who came out to vote for Bush in droves. However, it is noteworthy that throughout the campaign Karl Rove always talked about there being 4 million evangelicals who sat out the 2000 election, which still leaves a gap of 5 million votes. Is it plausible that even the Evil Genius Rove underestimated the untapped votes on the Religious Right by more than 100%? In any event, I have always been skeptical about the claim that there were that many on the Religious Right who sat out the 2000 election, and to the extent I have seen this issue addressed at all in exit polling data reported in the media, there does not seem to be any support for the conclusion that there was such a massive increase in turnout by evangelicals.

[An aside: This whole issue of the anomalous nature of the 2004 election results is being largely ignored in the mainstream media, probably because, as discussed below, the issue often spills over into claims of electoral fraud. As usual, the best analyses on this subject appear on www.consortiumnews.com. Robert Parry, the principal behind Consortium News, may well be the best journalist at work in America today. While his writings clearly tilt to the left, he is an experienced journalist (he wrote for Newsweek and Associated Press) who does his homework. The research underlying his reporting is meticulous and well documented.]

I do have one theory as to who these new Bush voters might be and unfortunately, it's not too encouraging for Democrats: they may well be old Perot voters. Notably, Perot's vote tally dropped by almost 12 million votes from 1992 to 1996, while Clinton's total increased by only 2.5 million and Dole's total in 1996 was about the same as Bush Sr.'s 1992 total. Thus, it appears that roughly 9 million Perot voters dropped out of the system. I always felt that the Perot appeal had a very militaristic edge to it, and it is possible that many of Bush's new voters were old Perot voters who are enthusiastic about the Iraq war and other manifestations of Bush's bellicosity, and therefore returned to the polls in order to register their support for Bush.

Another possibility is that there actually were substantial numbers of cross-over voters from Gore in 2000 to Bush in 2004 (such as voters who did not want to switch horses in midstream notwithstanding the fact that their horse is insane), but that Kerry succeeded in drawing an even larger number of new voters (minorities, youths) so as to offset the cross-over and actually improve upon Gore's tally. If so, that would suggest that the Kerry campaign was in fact a highly effective one, something that ought to be taken into consideration before prescriptions are made as to what the Democratic Party should do in the next election.

Whoever these new Bush voters are, however, the indisputable fact is that there were an awful lot of them in Florida. Bush got 1 million new votes in Florida alone, which represents approximately 11% of his nationwide new votes. Bush increased his Florida tally by more than 1 million votes over 2000 (2,909,176 in 2000 vs. 3,953,309 in 2004), again, a 34% increase that did not result from net switches away from the Democrats, since Kerry's Florida tally exceeded Gore's by almost 700,000 votes (2,907,451 for Gore vs. 3,572,099 for Kerry).

It is also noteworthy that much of Bush's new vote total in Florida came from Democratic counties. A note of clarification as to what I mean by "Democratic counties": The point has been made by some proponents of electoral fraud theories that Bush carried a large number of rural Florida counties in which the majority of registered voters are registered Democrats, suggesting that this makes the results suspicious. This point has been easily refuted by pointing out that the highly conservative voters in these rural counties (mostly in northern Florida) are merely nominal Democrats and that they have regularly supported Republicans in national elections. These are not the Democratic counties I am talking about.

The more interesting fact, however, is that Bush drew large numbers of new votes in counties that are really Democratic, and again, did so without net cross-overs from the Democrats. For example, in Palm Beach County, Kerry's total exceeded Gore's by 58,000 votes but Bush exceeded his 2000 total by 70,000 votes; in Hillsborough County (Tampa), Kerry's total exceeded Gore's by 43,000 votes but Bush exceeded his 2000 total by 64,000 votes; in Broward County, Kerry's total exceeded Gore's by 65,000 votes but Bush exceeded his 2000 total by 66,000 votes; in Orange County (Orlando), Kerry's total exceeded Gore's by 53,000 votes but Bush exceeded his 2000 total by 58,000 votes; in Duval County (Jacksonville), Kerry's total exceeded Gore's by 50,000 votes but Bush exceeded his 2000 total by 80,000 votes; in Pinellas County (St. Petersburg), Kerry's total exceeded Gore's by 25,000 votes but Bush exceeded his 2000 total by 50,000 votes; and in Volusia County (Daytona), Kerry's total exceeded Gore's by 18,000 votes but Bush exceeded his 2000 total by 29,000 votes. Kerry's gains exceeded Bush's gains in only three counties (all Democratic strongholds), and even in those counties, Bush still gained large numbers of new votes -- 13,000 new votes in Alachua County (Gainesville), 12,000 new votes in Leon County (Tallahassee), and 70,000 new votes in Miami-Dade County.

These voting results are rendered even more unusual when considered in light of voter registration trends in these large counties, which again, are clearly Democratic counties. For example, between 2000 and 2004, in Broward County there was an increase of 77,000 registered Democrats as opposed to only 17,000 newly-registered Republicans; in Palm Beach County there were 34,000 newly-registered Democrats as opposed to only 2,000 newly-registered Republicans; and in Orange County there were 49,000 newly-registered Democrats and 25,000 newly-registered Republicans. It is a safe bet that the newly-registered Democrats in these relatively cosmopolitan counties were real Democrats and not old-style Dixiecrats who went out and voted for Bush.

So, what about the big question: Were these election results the product of a massive fraud, or was the outpouring of large numbers of new Bush voters, particularly in Florida, simply a weird and thus far unexplained anomaly? I have always been skeptical of the claims of electoral fraud theorists. It seems highly unlikely that all of Florida's local election officials were in on the fraud, particularly since Bush's most impressive gains (in terms of volume of votes) came in counties where the local governments are controlled by Democrats (Broward, Palm Beach, etc.).

The divergence between the election results and the exit polls is a noteworthy fact. It is particularly worth pointing out that exit polls are routinely used by international observers in contested elections in so-called "Third World" countries (e.g., recently in Venezuela), since discrepancies between exit polls and election results are considered some indication that the results may not have been honestly tabulated. I am certainly not under the illusion that the Bush Administration is morally superior to the ruling government in some Banana Republic. Nevertheless, there are lots reason why the exit polls could have been wrong, and they certainly cannot be considered firm evidence of fraud.

If there was a fraud, I am inclined to think that it came about as a result of some kind of massive "hack" into a master tabulating computer. Studying the Florida results one has the feeling of watching Karl Rove hunched over his computer singing, "Anything you can do, I can do better," as in virtually every county, Kerry's impressive gains over Gore's vote are exceeded by even more impressive gains by Bush over his own 2000 totals. Is such a massive hack into the tabulating computer technically feasible? I have no idea. Some people say it could have happened (see www.blackboxvoting.org), but I have serious doubts about the credibility of these people. More responsible analysts, such as Consortium News, view the possibility with more skepticism.

In sum, I feel quite confident in saying, (1) it is extremely unlikely that there will ever be direct or conclusive evidence that such a fraud occurred and (2) as a result, there is no practical possibility that the results of the 2004 election will be overturned. Notwithstanding these conclusions, I'd still like to know what happened in this election. Did the 9 million new Bush voters really exist or were they merely the product of a computer hack, and if they did exist, who are they? We Democrats ought to know the answer to these questions before reaching any global conclusions about the future direction of the party.

If the mainstream media were doing its job, we could get these answers. It doesn't seem to me as though it would take all that much gumshoe work to find the mysterious 9 million new Bush voters. Indeed, I would think that the 1 million new Bush voters in Florida alone would be a pretty hard group of people to hide. And when you localize it further (the 66,000 new Bush voters in Broward County and the 70,000 new Bush voters in Palm Beach County), it seems painfully obvious that the answers should be readily discoverable. However, instead of doing any serious investigative journalism, bastions of the liberal media such as The New York Times and The Washington Post have run dismissive pieces casually branding anyone who raises the slightest question about the anomalous nature of the 2004 election results as a harebrained conspiracy theorist, all the while ignoring the central question: Who are these mysterious 9 million new voters who threw the election to Bush, and why are the so intent upon messing up our country?

America: I Hardly Knew Ye

I feel as though I owe an apology to all of my readers who may have derived what has turned out to be false hope from my optimistic predictions of a Kerry victory. I can only say that I believed every word of it when I wrote it. I guess I just did not know my country very well. For what it's worth, I can assure you that no one was more crushed than I was last night.

I will not, however, apologize for all of the positive things I wrote about John Kerry in this blog. It was an honor to write every word of praise. I fear that many on the Left did not appreciate what a great candidate we had.

I was crushed by the election results, but I do not disagree with Kerry's decision to concede. Bush should understand that when he received Kerry's phone call earlier today, he was talking to a mentsch. I don't think that Bush really can understand that.

I'm going to continue this blog. Rather than shooting from the hip at this time of emotional distress, I want to gather my thoughts some more about the meaning of the election and where we go from here.

Thanks for reading.

Remember 9/11

Everyone should remember September 11 when voting tomorrow. The Bush Campaign thinks that this would help Bush. It won't.

Remember the month before September 11, when Bush received a Memo saying that Al Quaeda was determined to launch an attack in the United States, and then he promptly went on vacation.

Remember September 11 itself, when Bush went right ahead with his photo-op and then disappeared into a bunker in Kansas while the rest of us had no idea how many more planes were out there and how many more attacks were yet to come.

And most of all, remember September 12, when all Americans were united in a resolve to defend our country, when everyone, Democrat and Republican alike, was willing to rally behind Bush for the good of America, and when all of the countries of the world declared solidarity with America in the battle against terrorism.

I heard Al Franken speak the other day, and he said that Bush "blew it" by squandering the opportunity with which he was presented as a result of the unprecdented level of national and international unity in the wake of 9/11. To be sure, Bush did "blow it." But what he did was far worse than that, far more insidious. Bush twisted the feelings of justifiable outrage that all Americans felt after September 11; he manipulated those feelings for ulterior motives; and then he exploited the outpouring of patriotism that rightly flowed from the horrors of 9/11 and used it to lead our country into an unnecessary and ill-conceived war in Iraq. Remember that when voting tomorrow.

I recently had occasion to Google "9/11." When you do that, you come up with page after page of websites advertising all sorts of 9/11 chatchkes. You can buy 9/11 pins, 9/11 posters, 9/11 hats, 9/11 t-shirts, 9/11 tablecloths, 9/11 shoes -- the merchandising is endless. Apparently, virtually any worthless piece of junk can be transformed into a money-maker just by slapping a 9/11 label on it.

My first reaction when seeing this was to express horror that people could exploit the memory of 9/11 for profit in this way. But really, is it any different from what Bush has done? Bush took an unmarketable war against Iraq -- a war that Cheney, Wolfowitz, et al., had been itching to launch from the day Bush took office -- stuck a 9/11 label on it and, bingo, you've suddenly got a saleable war that will make you the great hero of the fight against terrorism.

Why are we really fighting this war in Iraq? It's not because of weapons of mass destruction because there weren't any. It's not because because of ties between Iraq and Al Quaeda because there weren't any. And if you believe it's because Bush and Cheney just want to bring the wonders of democracy to the Iraqi people, then all I can say is have a good night and say hello to the tooth fairy for me.

There may be all kinds of fancy strategic jargon that can get thrown out there about the reasons why Bush launched this war but let's get serious. Let's admit the fact that there is only one reason why Bush launched this war, the same reason why Jed Clampett got to move into a mansion in Beverly Hills: Texas Tea, Black Gold -- Oil, my friends.

So please do remember 9/11 when you vote tomorrow. Remember that Osama Bin Laden is still out there, making videos with constantly-improving production values and looking as though he's spent a month in George Hamilton's tanning salon. Remember that he's still alive while over 1,100 American soldiers made the ultimate sacrifice in Bush's war for oil. Remember that the real war on terror is being ignored. Remember that George Bush exploited our anger, our fear, and our love of country, so that Halliburton could make a few more bucks.