According to this morning's San Francisco Chronicle, "GOP gubernatorial candidate Bill Simon -- just two months ago a mere footnote in the polls -- has, for the first time, charged ahead of former front-runner Richard Riordan among likely GOP primary voters, a Field poll shows. With just under a week to the March 5 primary, the poll shows Simon with the support of 37 percent of likely Republican voters to 31 percent for Riordan -- a stunning surge from last month, when Simon was 33 percentage points behind the former Los Angeles mayor."
It's an interesting story, but the poll looks a little, well... odd. First, the sample was small compared to last month's Field poll showing Riordan with a comfortable lead (646 registered voters vs. 1,022). And second, there's no explanation why the percentage of self-described "strongly conservative" voters rose from 37% of the sample in the last survey to 41% here, an important question since Simon's lead appears to be made up largely of those voters. (In most other demos, the race looks tight, with large numbers of undecideds.) I don't doubt that this poll has captured real movement in the race; I just wonder if Riordan isn't actually in better shape than he currently appears, particularly with almost 30% of female voters -- a natural Riordan constituency -- among the undecided.
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Thanks to Taegan Goddard's Political Wire for naming PPC one of "The Best Political Web Sites." The Wire is a terrific site, and has long been an essential PPC bookmark.
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According to this morning's Washington Post, "Both Republicans and Democrats in Congress are assailing President Bush's strategy to help the elderly afford prescription drugs, with the political parties in rare agreement that the administration wants to devote too little money to solving one of the main problems in the nation's health care system.... House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) and Senate Republicans want to spend at least $300 billion to subsidize medicine for some older Americans during the coming decade."
I understand the argument that last year's tax cut was designed to get the money out of Washington so it couldn't be spent. I also understand the argument that the tax cut was a bad idea because it dried up resources that would be needed for other things. Both positions are politically and intellectually coherent. What I don't understand is the notion, apparently embraced by most Republicans on the Hill, that we should both get the money out of town and spend it. When we look back in a few years and wonder which party is primarily responsible for the new wave of deficit spending, it's going to be hard for congressional Republicans to argue that their cut - taxes - and - spend - more approach wasn't the primary culprit.
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West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin tells The New Yorker that the American media is working overtime to turn President Bush into a hero. "That illusion may be what we need right now, but the truth is we're simply pretending to believe that Bush exhibited unspeakable courage at the World Series by throwing out the first pitch at Yankee Stadium, or that he, by God, showed those terrorists by going to Salt Lake City and jumbling the first line of the Olympic opening ceremony. The media is waving pom-poms, and the entire country is being polite."
Sorkin is obviously going to take a lot of heat for his remarks, and he probably should. But I do wonder how much of President Bush's 80% approval rating is composed of Democrats who'll never actually vote for him, who are just "being polite."
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Political Professional News has returned to PPC. An excerpt:
Las Vegas Political Consultant Says the 'I's Have It
Steve Forsythe, political consultant to District Attorney candidate Abigail "Abbi" Silver, has been busy putting out fires from Day One on the campaign. According to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, "Forsythe said before he joined the team, Silver had decided the spelling of her first name wasn't feminine enough, and began sending out campaign literature identifying herself as Abigail 'Abby' Silver. Except until this campaign, the deputy district attorney has never gone by 'Abby.' And newspaper stories that quote her as a prosecutor identify her as Abbi." Forsythe characterized the whole "Abby" experiment as "a decision made before I was on board," and assured Review-Journal readers that henceforth his candidate would be known as "Abbi."
Sounds like a smart strategi. Realli.
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Posting here at The O'Toole File will be light this weekend as we prepare for Monday's return of Political Professional News.
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If the mail is any guide, it seems that a number of folks who've never read The O'Toole File before have simply assumed that I would rather be (to borrow a phrase from Mr. Moyers) Right than right. Well...
Rather than try to write everyone individually to debate the point, I'll simply ask readers to click here, here, and here for my recent (and rather spirited) defense of "liberal" NYT columnist Paul Krugman when he was being attacked in certain conservative circles for his prior association with Enron. That should help clear up the matter.
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A reader, Chip Dudley, responds to my earlier post on the Bill Moyers/ Weekly Standard contretemps:
I'm not so sure about your analysis. Hayes' sentence "a dialogue between Moyers and, among others, [Dershowitz, et. al]," would seem to indicate that Moyers interviewed the man. If someone else interviewed him, then Moyers and Dershowitz did not have a dialogue. Pretty simple, really.
In fact, Hayes response to Moyers was singularly unimpressive. One would expect Hayes, especially considering the power and certitude of his original article, to painstakingly show how Moyers was exactly wrong in every area. He didn't really do that.
I'm no fan of Bill Moyers, but I'd have to score this one for him.
First of all, thanks for the letter; its polite and thoughtful tone are especially appreciated. Unfortunately, I just can't agree with you.
When a public figure like Moyers decides to pick a fight with a publication over the way it has portrayed him, the practical reality is that the onus is on the public figure to carefully craft a response which is virtually unassailable. I spent a great deal of time in a previous life trying to get reporters to see things my way on behalf of candidates and elected officials. Believe me -- the worst thing you can do in this type of situation is to get caught being as misleading as you are accusing the reporter of having been. It is, as I said earlier, a credibility killer.
And in this case, we're not talking about a niggling detail, either. Moyers opens his piece with these words: "Stephen Hayes opens his attack on me by claiming that in the PBS specials following September 11th I interviewed, among others, "Cornel West, O.J. attorney Alan Dershowitz, and 'Vagina Monologues' playwright Eve Ensler." He gets it right only once. I have never met or interviewed Alan Dershowitz or Eve Ensler.
"Two errors on the opening pitch: Not a promising start. But it's the standard (no pun intended) Mr. Hayes maintains for the remainder of his game."
In other words, these allegations of factual "errors" are the thread upon which Moyers hangs his entire response, and it's very hard to read them now without believing that Moyers meant to deceive. Imagine how much weaker his entire letter would have been had he opened it by quibbling over the words "dialogue," "interviewed" and "presented," rather than by suggesting that the reporter had simply gotten the facts wrong. There's really just no comparison.
Anyway, thanks again for the letter, and I hope you keep reading. Anyone else who would like to respond can e-mail The O'Toole File here. I can't promise I'll print them all, but I'll certainly give them all a fair reading.
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If I'm reading my log files right, it looks as though a few folks who have found The O'Toole File through a direct link to a specific post from another site (Thanks InstaPundit!) may have Bookmarked the page on which that item is archived for posterity rather than the main O'TF page. If that's the case, please click here to go to the O'Toole File and update your Bookmark. Thanks.
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National Review's Rich Lowry digs up the transcript of a January 23, 2000 interview in which candidate George W. Bush explicitly promises to veto McCain - Feingold - style campaign finance reform, and compares the whole situation to that faced by another President Bush: "This is exactly the double whammy that Bush Sr. experienced when he capitulated on taxes. It wasn't just the effect of the policy that hurt Bush, but the damage it did to his political character in the mind of the public." Strong stuff from a friend of the Administration.
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I really can't add anything to Matt Welch's simple eloquence.
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This morning, Weekly Standard writer Stephen F. Hayes responds to Bill Moyers' allegations of distortion and outright duplicity in Hayes' recent cover story on the former LBJ staffer and the multimedia empire he runs.
I've been looking forward to the magazine's response because Moyers' complaints were, in many cases, specific and factual. Either Moyers was guilty of intentional deception, or Hayes was. Honestly, I suspected Hayes; Moyers' denials were unequivocal, and it made no sense for him to lie about easily verifiable facts. (A brief example: Hayes writes in his original article that, on September 20, a Moyers' program titled "America Responds: A National Conversation with Bill Moyers," featured "two hours of live dialogue between Moyers and, among others, author and rapper extraordinaire Cornel West, O.J. attorney Alan Dershowitz, and "Vagina Monologues" playwright Eve Ensler." Moyers states crisply in rebuttal: "I have never met or interviewed Alan Dershowitz or Eve Ensler." Sounds pretty strong, doesn't it? Well, that "denial" turns out to be a silly, what - the - meaning - of - is - is construction based on the fact that Moyers presented these guests rather than interviewing them directly. Talk about a credibility killer...)
It looks like my suspicions were wrong. Score this one for Stephen Hayes and The Weekly Standard.
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According to this story on the Dow Jones Newswire, "A former Enron Corp. employee has written a letter to U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer claiming that he has knowledge the company's trading arm manipulated wholesale electricity prices in California.... The letter, sent to Sen. Boxer (D., Calif. ) last week by David Fabian, a former employee for Enron's trading unit who wrote the company's trading software for electricity and natural gas sales, claims Enron congested the state's transmission lines and then resold the power in the state's wholesale electricity market at skyrocketing rates."
As I wrote a few days ago, this is going to be the real Enron scandal, and the political fallout will be significant.
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Today, the Moose weighs in on American corporations that dodge their taxes by setting up shop in offshore tax havens. "This story gives new meaning to class warfare! The Moose is a major supporter of the Bush defense build-up - but it is outrageous that middle-class and working class Americans should foot the bill with their taxes and sending their sons and daughters to fight while some corporations go AWOL." As a recent presidential candidate used to say, Where's the outrage!
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"Oh, there are plenty of people who oppose cloning. They just have trouble coming up with reasons that go beyond 'I just don't like it.'" So says Glenn Reynolds (aka InstaPundit) in a smart column over at FOXNews.
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The Wednesday edition of Punditwatch is up. Give it a read.
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"[A]dvocates of McCain - Feingold - style campaign finance reform should think long and hard about its implications before they create a system in which candidates and parties are forced to rely more and more on the kindness of strangers to finance their political infrastructures. The goals of M-F are laudable enough, but transparency will almost certainly be its first victim." [emphasis added] The O'Toole File, January 26, 2002
"Last week's passage of the Shays-Meehan campaign finance reform bill marked a terrific opportunity for the House of Representatives to look, feel and sound good. Too bad that even if signed into law, the bill is unlikely to achieve its objectives and may well result in less transparency in our political process rather than more." [emphasis added] Charlie Cook, National Journal, February 19, 2002
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Anne Applebaum asks a very good question today in Slate. "I realize, of course, that being good at giving interviews to British newspapers isn't a quality much admired in Washington, D.C. Still, [Colin] Powell's ability to bring foreigners around to the American point of view is something this administration, which is carrying out nothing short of a revolution in foreign policy, needs badly�so why should Powell be thought of as a loser or an outsider?"
Now, I know that Colin Powell isn't every conservative's cup of tea. (As does he, of course: his face almost seems to glow when he's pulling conservative tails, as he recently did while discussing condoms on MTV.) But doctrinaire conservatives need to realize that it's precisely the independent streak that they find so troubling that makes Powell such a credible voice when he gets out front and defends the President, as he did in the post-SOTU debate over the Axis of Evil. Truth be told, Powell's global stature and credibility have made him the Administration's indispensable man in the war on terror.
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I'd just like to add my voice to the chorus of kudos heading Will Vehrs' way since his smart and snappy PunditWatch was picked up by FOXNews.com. Congratulations.
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The Moose is back today with some interesting observations on the Democrats' "best hope" for challenging President Bush in '04 -- "a politician with some of the skills of Bill Clinton without the ... uh .... problems."
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As is so often the case, Josh Marshall gets it just about right in this post on the "aggressive accounting" practices that more and more corporations are using to avoid paying their share of the American tax burden.
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Pundits have been bloviating on the subject of Enron and its potential political ramifications for weeks now. This is the O'Toole File take on the story.
The whole Enronathon is probably an equal opportunity scandal at the national level; both sides took money, both sides did some favors, and, if Dems are generally helped by a climate of corporate suspicion, Republicans are assisted by the anti-Washington sentiment generated by the attack on Enron's Congressional
inquisitors. The real effect will be on the presidential election of 2004.
If George W. Bush wants to turn the next presidential election into a victory lap, he's got to peel off a part of the Democratic electoral base. (The vaunted Republican electoral L is long gone.) That means that he has to be at least competitive in states that have been reliably Democratic. Until the Enron scandal broke, the Bush folks clearly meant to concentrate on the newly-Democratic Far West. Post Enron, that may no longer be possible.
Before the scandal, the California energy crisis, with its double-digit price increases and rolling blackouts, was hard to explain to voters. Republicans talked about failed deregulation and free-market principles; Democrats went on about spot prices and some Texas company called Enron.
Six of one, half-dozen of the other.
Suddenly, the Democratic story is simple. A bunch of crooks called Enron cut off your power and extorted your money to turn it back on. And guess what? George W. Bush let them get away with it. Wait for the thirty second spots, and see how easy it is to communicate this idea.
All of which means that the Far West probably won't be competitive in 2002, even if Richard Riordan wins the governorship as a Rockefeller Republican. That means we're back to fighting over Pennsylvania, Michigan, etc., states that have been trending Democratic in recent years. In other words, don't look for the "Enron effect" in national polls. Look for it where all presidential politics ultimately plays out -- state by state. Particularly out West.
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Today, PPC is officially joining the blogger revolution. It's a fabulous system, and its convenience and ease-of-use should allow me to post to this space much more frequently. I've said this before, but just in case anyone missed it: the first candidate or elected official who effectively uses the blogging concept is going to bring on the whole Internet political age that professional political consultants (like my friend and former boss Phil Noble) have been predicting for the past few cycles. Bet on it.
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