Clinton and NIE

Sep 26 2006 Published by under Congress, Craziness, Democrats, Government, Politics, Republicans, Terrorism, The President, War

The big news of the last two days seems to be the meltdown of Bill Clinton on Fox News Sunday and the “leaked” details of the National Intelligence Estimate. The Hill has a column by Dick Morris (currently unavailable due to server error) indicating Clinton’s behavior was more the rule than the exception and challenging his assertions that he was awake at the wheel.

Why didn’t the CIA and FBI realize the extent of bin Laden’s involvement in terrorism? Because Clinton never took the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center sufficiently seriously. He never visited the site and his only public comment was to caution against “over-reaction.” In his pre-9/11 memoirs, George Stephanopoulos confirms that he and others on the staff saw it as a “failed bombing” and noted that it was far from topic A at the White House. Rather than the full-court press that the first terror attack on American soil deserved, Clinton let the investigation be handled by the FBI on location in New York without making it the national emergency it actually was.

The Washington Times and NY Post react with Condi and further info to discredit the claims Clinton made. (Does anyone care to wager the mainstream media will challenge his claims like this?)

On the NIE front, the Washington Post might as well have issued a special edition with wall-to-wall NIE coverage. E.J. Dionne uses it to bolster his argument that the protesters of today are no ‘hippie radicals’ and the GOP faces trouble in November.

That is why news over the weekend of a National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq is especially troublesome for Republican electoral chances. By finding that the war in Iraq has encouraged global terrorism and spawned a new generation of Islamic radicals, the report by 16 government intelligence services undercuts the administration’s central argument that the Iraq war has made the United States safer.

Michael Abramowitz and Jonathan Weisman continue the WaPo NIE highlight reel and cover the Democrats use of the report in their electoral strategy.

Democratic lawmakers yesterday seized on elements of a new classified intelligence assessment as validation of their long-standing position that the Iraq war has been a distraction from the broader war against terrorists, seeing the new study as an opportunity to undermine President Bush’s determined offensive to turn terrorism to political advantage in the midterm elections.

What I find interesting about the Democrat tactic is the fact that they’re arguing the Iraq War is a distraction from terrorism, but ignoring the fact that our presence in Afghanistan – widely perceived to be legitimate by comparison – is also fueling the fire. We’re coming under increasing attack in Afghanistan, and that is an ‘approved’ front in the war on terror.

If the difference between the two is our internal comfort level, someone should let the insurgents know they need to lay off in Kabul because our presence has been self-justified.

The Wall Street Journal probably has the best solution. They suggest the government simply declassify the report – allowing for redaction or summary of sensitive information that would reveal sources or methods.

It’s impossible to know how true this report is, of course, since the NIE itself hasn’t been leaked. The reports are based on what sources claim the NIE says, but we don’t know who those sources are and what motivations they might have. Since their spin coincides rather conveniently with the argument made by Democratic critics of the war, and since this leak has also conveniently sprung in high campaign season, wise readers will be skeptical.

Releasing the NIE is probably the best idea. It’s not like most of what’s in the report would be news to anyone.

The whole debate on the NIE is actually a good case study in how to reduce a problem. The argument seems to be whether the bad guys like us less today than they did before we went into Iraq. They had killed 3,000 Americans in one morning before we went into the Middle East – claiming to still be offended by our efforts in Iraq circa 1991 and our continuing presence in Saudi Arabia – but all of that is lost.

The whole discussion has come down to a debate over “degrees of hate”. It’s kind of stupid if you think about it. Does it matter how much they hate us? If they were flying planes into buildings before they really, really hated us, doesn’t that tell us that we are even more justified in trying to eradicate the threat?

I think it does.

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E.J. Dionne The Watherman

Aug 18 2006 Published by under Candidates, Democrats, Elections, Politics, Republicans

PoliticsE.J. Dionne should go to work as a weatherman for Channel 4. That’s the only job I have ever seen where you are allowed to be more wrong, more often than the WaPo columnist. Today’s diatribe on the “successes” of campaign finance reform is truly astounding for it’s willingness to overlook almost every single piece of evidence that finance reform is, was, and always will be a total failure.

Opponents of campaign finance reform love to claim that the money-in-politics problem is insoluble. But the public financing of presidential campaigns, instituted in response to the Watergate scandals of the early 1970s, was that rare reform that accomplished exactly what it was supposed to achieve.

Sure, E.J. I can totally see your point. For a period of about a decade following the passage of the FEC Act, everyone played nice. But contrary to your claims, the reason it began to fall apart was not due to restrictions on the limits and a lack of indexing for inflation. It began to fall apart for exactly the reasons the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA) has begun to fail – political professionals have found the loopholes.

Look at the influence of 527s in the last election. They spent hundreds of millions in unregulated money to influence the election. Granted, most of that went to Democrats, so to Dionne that may be a success, but it did not remove the special interest money in politics. It just moved that money from national party’s to outside groups. That money will always find a way in.

Why? Why will they always find loopholes? Because it is what our society demands. We demand they raise and spend ever greater amounts because we market candidates like we market products. Campaigns will always be outrageously expensive, but that is due to an uninformed and unengaged electorate that has to be shocked awake every two to four years.

Think of campaigns as a marketing campaign similar to that of a movie or soft drink. You have a period of several months to take a guy that most people have probably never heard of, and make him a household name on par with Brad Pitt. In our media saturated society, that takes lots and lots of money. In the primary alone, Kerry and Bush spent in excess of $500 million dollars. That requires every man woman and child to kick in $2.

Given that there are probably somewhere in the range of about 2-4 million people who are even willing to donate at all, that makes their average gift (just for the Presidential candidates) closer to $100-$250. Since most of the 2-4 million won’t give at that level, someone has to give a lot more to average it out.

Look at John Kerry’s test balloon regarding abandoning matching funds in the general election. We watched that very closely from the Bush campaign and wondered how serious they were. For Kerry to have competed with the roughly $75 million we received in matching funds, they would probably need to raise in excess of $100-$125 million (assuming costs associated with raising money). Would the Internet have made that doable (or even necessary from an overhead standpoint)? Who knows.

The point is, unlike the primary matching funds, which you can count on going up based on your success at attracting small contributions, general election matching funds are set, and candidates are seriously looking at opting out of that system as well.

If public financing works so well, why is everyone abandoning the system? If small dollar donors are engaged and participating as never before, why do we need progressive matching system to provide up to four times the amount they give in order to be competitive?

Our society – and the way we choose to engage (or not engage) in politics – is the reason campaign finance fails. It is not a lack of inflation adjusted contribution limits or 4 to 1 contribution ratios. It is a media rich society that consumes politicians the same way we consume Coke, Pepsi, and McDonald’s. To become a household name in this society requires good marketing. That, in turn, requires more cash than the federal government is willing or able to throw at it.

Even if TV were free to all candidates, the money would still find its way in to support the purchase of radio ads, and every banner ad you can imagine. It’s the nature of politics and our society and no amount of feel-good, liberal, good-government nonsense will change that.

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