From the WSJ Opinion Archives
That '70s Show
"I called the media. . . . I said, 'If I take some crippled veterans down to the White House and we chain ourselves to the gates, will we get coverage?' 'Oh, yes, we will cover that.' "--John Kerry, testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, April 22, 1971
"Kerry is sending to Crawford former Sen. Max Cleland of Georgia, a frequent companion of Kerry's on the campaign trail and a fellow Vietnam War veteran who lost three limbs during the war. Cleland . . . will try to deliver a letter protesting the [Swift Boat Veterans for Truth] ads to [President] Bush at his heavily guarded ranch, Kerry aides said."--Reuters, Aug. 25, 2004
The
Chutzpah Campaign
You almost have to admire the shamelessness with which John Kerry and his supporters
in the press and elsewhere are dealing with the whole Vietnam question. Here's
the latest, from an Associated Press dispatch on a Philadelphia campaign appearance
yesterday:
At the fund-raiser, Kerry defended his anti-war activism as "an act of conscience."
"You can judge my character, incidentally, by that," Kerry said. "Because when the time for moral crisis existed in this country, I wasn't taking care of myself, I was taking care of public policy. I was taking care of things that made a difference to the life of this nation. You may not have agreed with me, but I stood up and was counted and that's the kind of president I'm going to be."
Yet at the same time, he is waging a smear campaign against a group of Vietnam veterans who are using his antiwar activism to make a judgment about the kind of president he would be.
Then there's the whole effort to paint the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth as a part of the Bush campaign, which would be illegal under the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law. The latest "connection" the pro-Kerry press has discovered is that a lawyer, Benjamin Ginsberg, counts both the campaign and the Swift Boat Veterans among his clients. "Attorney Works for Bush, Anti-Kerry Group," reads the Associated Press headline. And from the New York Times: "Bush Campaign's Top Outside Lawyer Advised Veterans Group."
Ginsberg tendered his resignation today to defuse the controversy. Yet if you read the articles all the way through, you find that this is either a complete nonstory or something of which both sides are equally guilty. Here are the final two paragraphs of the AP dispatch:
Joe Sandler, a lawyer for the [Democratic National Committee] and a group running anti-Bush ads, MoveOn.org, said there is nothing wrong with serving in both roles at once.
In addition to the [Federal Elections Commission's] coordination rules, attorneys are ethically bound to maintain attorney-client confidentiality, Sandler said. They could lose their law license if they violate that, he said.
And here's the fourth paragraph of the Times piece:
The campaign of Senator John Kerry shares a lawyer, Robert Bauer, with America Coming Together, a liberal group that is organizing a huge multimillion-dollar get-out-the-vote drive that is far more ambitious than the Swift boat group's activities. Mr. Ginsberg said his role was no different from Mr. Bauer's.
When the Times asks a Kerry spokesman about Bauer, he evades the question:
"It's another piece of evidence of the ties between the Bush campaign and this group," Chad Clanton, a spokesman for Mr. Kerry, said. Asked about his campaign's use of shared lawyers, Mr. Clanton said, "If the Bush campaign truly disapproved of this smear, their top lawyer wouldn't be involved.''
Yet the Times still put the story on the front page with a headline suggesting that the Bush campaign is guilty of something. Doesn't the paper have any concern about its own credibility as a disinterested provider of news?
Another
Seared--Seared--Memory
From a John Kerry speech commemorating Martin Luther King Day, Jan. 20,
2003:
I remember well April 1968--I was serving in Vietnam--a place of violence--when the news reports brought home to me and my crewmates the violence back home--and the tragic news that one of the bullets flying that terrible spring took the life of that unabashedly maladjusted citizen.
In fact, Kerry did not go to Vietnam until November 1968.
Who
Says He Hasn't Got Sex Appeal?
"The Women Who Are Eyeing Kerry's Seat"--headline, Boston Globe, Aug. 24
A
One-Sentence Flip-Flop
"The truth, which is what elections are all about, is that the tax burden of
the middle class has gone up while the tax burden of the middle class has gone
down."--John Kerry, quoted by the Associated Press, Aug. 25
Will
Colorado Flunk College?
ASPEN, Colo.--As long as we're visiting the Centennial State, we thought we'd
write something about the initiative that will appear on the November ballot
to change the way Colorado allocates its electoral votes. The Colorado Electoral
College Reform Initiative would allocate the state's 9 electoral votes proportionately
to each candidate's popular vote, and it would be retroactive to the 2004 election.
Currently the candidate who wins a plurality of the popular vote gets all of
the state's electors, as is the case in 47 other states and the District of
Columbia. (Maine and Nebraska allocate 2 electoral votes to the statewide winner
and the remaining votes by congressional district, though neither has had a
split since adopting this method.)
The initiative is a transparent effort to help John Kerry, who is expected to lose Colorado. If it had been in effect in 2000, Al Gore would have picked up 3 of the state's 8 electoral votes (one has been added since, thanks to reapportionment). This would have shifted the overall electoral vote from 271-266 in Bush's favor to 270-268 in Gore's. (One Gore elector from the District of Columbia abstained but said she would have cast her vote for Gore if it had been decisive.) If Kerry took 3 or 4 of Colorado's electors this year, that could make the difference in a close election.
But Coloradans would have to be pretty stupid to approve this measure, for the result would be to diminish the state's power in electing a president. To see why, consider this: In postwar elections, the Democrats have never received less than 31.1% of the Colorado vote (Jimmy Carter's total in 1980). The Republicans' worst showing was George H.W. Bush's 35.9% in 1992. If we take this as each party's floor, Democrats would have a lock on 2 of Colorado's electoral votes and Republicans on 3 of them, leaving a maximum of 4 electoral votes in play in any given election--the number of electoral votes such small states as Hawaii, Idaho and New Hampshire have. And winning all 4 of those votes (for a 7-2 GOP advantage or a 6-3 Democratic one) would require a blowout victory in the state.
The Bush campaign is concerned enough about Colorado that it has been airing campaign ads here, something we never see back home in solidly Democratic New York. It's unlikely that either candidate would bother to campaign in a state where at most 4, and more realistically only 1 or 2, electoral votes are at stake.
What would happen if every state adopted the proposed Colorado system? For one thing, "swing" states would be a thing of the past; the difference between carrying Iowa and losing it by a small plurality would be 1 electoral vote (4-3 vs. 3-4) rather than 7. This would benefit large states at the expense of small ones. It's a lot easier to shift, say, 3.2% of the vote in New York (which has 31 electoral votes) than 25% in New Hampshire (4).
It would also increase the importance of third parties, thereby possibly pushing the major parties to extremes. No third-party candidate has carried a state since George Wallace in 1968, but under a proportional system for choosing electors, several would have won electoral votes.
We ran the numbers for the 2000 election, and it turns out that if all states followed the proposed Colorado system, Ralph Nader would have garnered 6 electoral votes (2 from California and 1 each from Massachusetts, Ohio, New York and Texas). Gore would have outpolled Bush, 268-264, but neither candidate would have had a 270-vote majority. If Gore was unable to persuade two Nader electors to break ranks and vote for him--which presumably would have entailed policy concessions to their far-left agenda--the election would have been thrown to the House. We haven't run the numbers for 1992, but it's unlikely that Bill Clinton's 43% popular-vote plurality would have translated into an electoral majority under a proportional system.
In the long run, this initiative would be bad for Colorado as a whole. Even in the short run, it benefits only the candidate who fails to carry the state, and by definition he does not command a majority of voters. So we'd be very surprised if Coloradans were foolish enough to pass this misguided measure.
This
Just In
"Electoral College Holds Key to Election, Again"--headline, Centre
Daily Times (State College, Pa.), Aug. 24
Terror
in Moscow?
Either that or an amazing and horrible coincidence. A pair of planes crashed
almost simultaneously after taking off from Domodedovo Airport in the Russian
capital last night, killing 89. "Officials said one jet sent a hijack distress
signal, raising fears terrorists had struck," the Associated Press reports.
"Russian security authorities said that explosives specialists were still working at the scene of the crashes," the AP adds. "They reported that terrorism remained a possible cause, although there was no evidence so far that terrorists were behind the tragedies." Stay tuned.
Dude
Interviews Mrs. Edwards
Yesterday
we noted that Elizabeth Edwards had asked that the (Tucson) Arizona Daily
Star assign a female reporter to interview her. We hadn't seen the follow-up
story; it turns out that the Star, to its credit, turned down the request:
Managing Editor Teri Hayt overruled other editors who on Friday agreed to the request.
"That was our mistake. We shouldn't have agreed to their request," Hayt said. "They do not get to pick the reporter they want to get their message out."
Instead, C.J. Karamargin, "the Star's male political reporter," did the interview. Of course, this raises the possibility of reverse psychology. Maybe next time she's being interviewed, Mrs. Edwards will ask for a man on the theory that the newspaper will feel honor-bound to deny the request and send a woman.
The Star's follow-up report also alerted us to an earlier story, which we'd missed:
Hayt compared the request to an unsuccessful bid by the Bush-Cheney campaign for the Star to disclose the race of Mamta Popat, a photographer assigned to cover Vice President Dick Cheney at a rally last month.
"This was another attempt to manipulate our political news coverage," she said.
We tracked down the contemporaneous report on the Popat matter:
"It was such an outrageous request, I was personally insulted," Hayt said later. . . .
"One has to wonder what they were going to do with that information," Hayt said. "Because she has Indian ancestry, were they going to deny her access? I don't know."
Journalists covering the president or vice president must undergo a background check and are required to provide their name, date of birth and Social Security number. The Star provided that information Thursday for Popat and this reporter.
"That's all anybody has been asked to provide," said Hayt, adding that this is the first time in her 26-year career that a journalist's race was made an issue.
The paper says it was a Bush campaign operative, not the Secret Service, who asked the question, which was indeed stupid and obnoxious--though one must wonder why Hayt felt compelled to make the gratuitous revelation in her paper that Popat "has Indian ancestry."
The
Roe Effect
College students are moving to the right, the Christian Science Monitor reports.
"Cultural and political observers have been declaring a conservative groundswell
for at least 15 years":
Why are youth embracing conservatism? There are two reasons, says Ryan Thompson, editor in chief of Young Conservatives (www.yconservatives.com), a weekly Web publication with a staff of about two dozen young writers nationwide.
"There [are] legitimate people out there that really believe in this, and I think that's because some parents in some respects are a little more protective because they know what they did during the '60s generation," says Mr. Thompson, who expects to begin his freshman year at Hillsdale College in Michigan this fall. "Then, there's also some [for whom] I think it's a rebellion, almost. You see the excesses of that generation. And people, when they see the excesses of one generation, they go to another side."
Doesn't Ryan Thompson read this column? If he does, he should know about the Roe effect, which started diminishing the population of college-age liberals just about 15 years ago.
You
Don't Say
"Late Fees Add to Credit Card Expense"--headline, Associated Press,
Aug. 25
Not
Too Brite--CLVIII
"A Tanzanian who went to a witch doctor in search of the power to resist
bullets and knife attacks died when ritual cuts made on his body proved fatal,"
Reuters reports from Dar es Salaam.
Oddly Enough!
(For an explanation of the "Not Too Brite" series, click here.)
They
Also Found Some Fuzzy Dice and Grateful Dead 8-Tracks
"First Toilet and Sewer System of Prehistoric Period Found in Van"--Turkish
Press, Aug. 22
Chicken
Alert
"We will be regularly updating the site with examples of the New McCarthyism
that is sweeping the country," The Progressive, a left-wing magazine, says
atop its feature called "McCarthyism Watch." Its latest example involves
one Paul Bame, a 45-year-old software engineer from Fort Collins, Colo. Bame
says that on July 22 he got a phone message at home from an FBI agent, Ted Faul.
"I was afraid," says Bame.
Bame apparently didn't return Faul's call, so Faul went to Bame's office the next day:
"He said my name came up at headquarters as someone who might have information about plans for mayhem at the conventions," Bame says. "He wondered if I had that information. And I responded that I'd be happy to discuss this with him with a lawyer present."
Agent Faul pressed on, according to Bame.
"He said, 'Is there any particular piece of this that you think you need a lawyer present for?' "
Bame says he responded: "Whenever questioned by the FBI, I think it's wise to have a lawyer present."
And that was pretty much the end of the encounter, he says.
"I was scared to death the whole time," Bame says. All we can say is it's a good thing we don't actually have a tyrannical government, because our "dissidents" sure are a bunch of poltroons.
(Carol Muller helps compile Best of the Web Today. Thanks to Michael Segal, Gordon Haave, Patrick Spero, Alisa Duncanson, Jim Davey, Christopher Gundlach, Andrew Penchuk, Daniel Goldstein, Donald Parnell, Daren Heidgerken, Steve Roberts, Alec Haapala, Rob Robertson, Michael Zwick, Robert Lawrence, D. Wheeler, Nathan Sales, Andrew Robinson, David Grady, Michael Guill, Andrew Hotchkies, Brent Silver, Jeffrey Bergman, Scott Jones, Paul Williams, Doug Weatherston, David Anderson, Bob Boomsma, Jerry Carroll, Michele Reboulet, John Sanders, Bill Vis, Lee Hollaar, Robert Brooks, Bill Dyer, Edward Schulze, Eric Ivers, Mark Wallace, David Darby, Philip Zukowski, Robin Fennema, David Cincotta, Marty Geraghty, Howard Lucy, Kevin Schmidt, Terry Gathercoal, Bruce Bartlett, Erik Andresen, Aaron Dickey, Ron Wright, Barak Moore, S.E. Brenner, Mara Gold, Thomas Dillon, Paul Green, Bill Blankfield, Jeff Brown, Brian Azman, Skip King and Greg Hartman. If you have a tip, write us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)
Today on OpinionJournal:
- Review & Outlook: Reasons for skepticism about a Republican's plan to reorganize intelligence.
- Claudia Rosett: Fed up with Vietnamania? Relief is at hand.
- Allen Barra: If Paul Hamm wants to keep his gold medal, let him defend it in competition.
