Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal (2004)

I hear a lot of people who are in the ABB(anybody but Bush) camp. Most likely I will end up there myself.

At the NYT Dean has become the insurgent.

Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts won the Iowa caucuses here Monday, brushing aside the insurgent candidacy of Howard Dean with an appeal that he would be the strongest candidate the Democrats had to beat President Bush.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/19/politics/campaigns/18CND-CAUC.html?hp

So what is in a word? In this case insurgent.
http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=insurgent&sa=N&tab=wn

The good news for the Democrats is that they now have two viable candidates, Kerry and Edwards. The bad news for Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda is that the idiotarian left in this country has suffered a major defeat.

Bush is winning on Iraq, and the Democrats (outside of academic never-never land) have figured that out. Iraq is the main issue for 14% of Iowa Democratic voters.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it Saddam Chomsky.

Brad quotes Froomkin: The biggest loser is the GOP. Not only are they deprived of a great target, but they have to spend more on opposition research for longer as there are so many targets.

This is ridiculous.

Looking at the Iowa Electronic Markets http://128.255.244.60/graphs/graph_DConv04_jpg.cfm it looks like the shareholders really failed to predict the Iowa result. That graph looks like a bunch of people reacting to unexpected news. No way was this a crowd of people in the know with information beyond what the media was reporting.

Gentlemen (and ladies, for the few here)! A proposal! The term "idiotarian" be banned from use by right-wing denizens. In exchange, the term "wingnut" will be banned from use by left-wing denizens.

These terms are so utterly vacuous that it'd be better just to not say anything, IMHO.

(this isn't directed at Joe Willingham in particular. I'm just sick of those words in general, and he happened to be the last guy I saw to use them)

(Oh, and just to clarify: Brad, I'm not actually literally asking you to *ban* those words, by actually deleting/editing posts (not that I think you'd have the poor sense to listen to me if that's what I were proposing anyway). I'm just imploring people to stop doing it.)

No, I'm happy for wingnuts like Joe to call me whatever they like - on the principle that he who throws mud loses ground.

The word 'idiotarian' is useful. When somebody uses it in a non-sarcastic sense, I know that they're a Den Beste-ian.

It's good news for small gov't conservatives, who are not happy with Bush pandering on every special interest to bribe voters with a huge deficit.

Both Kerry and Edwards are good enough to get elected; they'll either be good enough to make Bush focus on issues. They'll prolly be good enough to help Dems avoid losing too much in the House & Senate.

Neither is likely to win, in 2004. But if Edwards does well, there's also 2008. And, in any case, he's the Dem most likely to win some Southern states -- and the Dems prolly can't win the Pres. w/o at least one S. state.

Too bad Edwards is sort of bad on trade, favoring protectionism.

It was enscribed:

on the principle that he who throws mud loses ground.

What do you suppose Dukakis thinks of this principle?

However, the word "idiotarian" is not without utility. Whenever I see it I can stop reading that item. Anything that even slightly eases the information overload can't be all bad.

I thought Edwards speech was magnificent last night. I consider myself to be a conservative, but Bush's spending policies and lack of planning for his foreign policy have me looking at alternatives to the Republican Party. On fiscal matters, the record shows that Democrats are more conservative than Republicans. Edwards' message about the two different Americas was spot on. And it was focused on the stuff that matters. I believe that everyone should be forced to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, but with some important exceptions. An opportunity at a good education should not be determined by your parents' wealth. Access to healthcare should not be determined by your financial situation. If you are physically able to work, and you work 40 hours a week, you should get quality healthcare for you family and a solid education for your children. After that, it should be up to you to determine if you live a life of relative prosperity or relative deprivation.

Kerry is our own private Bob Dole.

A senator forever,
been on TV forever,
war hero,
famous wife.

Guess it must be his turn...

Nobody who saw Howard Dean's concession speech last night thinks the GOP was the big loser in Iowa.

Saying the GOP was the loser is hyperbole, but it was certainly a good day for the Democrats. The best candidates are rising to the top.

Have you seen the Brooks column in todays NYT? When he's not out hunting anti-semites he can come back to earth and write a decent opinion piece. The supporters of the Democratic Party are sophisticated and as American as Apple Pie. I don't think Rove's "Democrats are kooks" mantra is gonna work in 2004.

I hope the four-way Democratic contest goes on for some time. It is taking all the media oxygen away from Bush, and I think more and more independents will come to see the superiority of one or more of them to Bush. We are indeed winners.

timshel:

Sadly enough, your expressed wish for universal healthcare alone is enough to get you banned for life from today's Republican party. Come over to the dark side (formerly known as the center)....

George Lee:>"Howard Dean's concession speech"

Why is everyone calling it a concession speech? There's no need for Dean to concede anything at this point.

Do you need to hear him say "I'm sorry I didn't get the most Iowa delegates. I'll try to be quieter and nicer now?"

If you find Dean's pulpit pounding disturbing, it's probably because you still have a job and are fairly comfortable.

Some 2-3 million more Americans are a bit less comfortable these days, and they wont' have to skip out of work to vote.

It's entirely possible the reason Kerry and Edwards did so well was due to disaffected Iowa Republicans crossing lines to vote for a Dem candidate they could support in November.

"I hope the four-way Democratic contest goes on for some time. It is taking all the media oxygen away from Bush, and I think more and more independents will come to see the superiority of one or more of them to Bush. We are indeed winners."

Well, maybe. But the traditional viewpoint is that a long, bruising primary fight is bad for the party in question. Lack of money, too many negative adds from the opposition, fatigue, etc. etc.

And Bush is the president. You cannot suck oxygen away from the president. You just can't, for more than a day or two. The president is the president. He sneezes, its on TV.

On another thread someone originally from Iowa called and said that about 40% of the people in his parents' caucus were Republicans his parents knew personally, who he said were not saboteurs sent by the party, but people who were unhappy with Bush. Iowa caucusses allow party change at the last minute.

File it under rumor. But a significant proportion of the Republicans I know who read more than the front page of the paper and don't depend on TV talk shows for information are unhappy with Bush. Perhaps there will be a bit of realignment in the fall, with the big-government militarists of both parties voting for Bush.

I do not think that the Dems should run to the right of Bush on the nebulous "War on Terror", except perhaps to point out that Bush's Saudi friends have been protected so far. But I've seen that proposed. Having Clark or Kerry there might protect against the "weak on defense" argument, but I do not expect them to beat the drums of war and will be horrified if they do.

A short bruising fight now won’t be fatal to the Democrats, and will help the country to see that the issues and candidates are being well sorted out. It’s a good thing.

Theory: the American public's memory usually lasts about three months.

Therefore the general election campaign is going to be long enough this time for each Presidential candidate to change ALL of his major positions TWICE, and almost no one will notice!

In this sense, it almost doesn’t matter who’s running.

That means the campaign is going to be about personal qualities. And THAT means the election is going down to the wire again. (Although hopefully not in to see SCOTUS, i.e. down to Scalia and Cheney in a rowboat.)

Look at how the White House has been trying for months to paint Dean as "angry"--that's not a sideshow, that's the main event.

Bush will be painted as "shortsighted and lying". Kerry (if it is he) will be painted as "unstable and crazy", or somesuch. (No doubt we shall hear the focus-tested epithets resound shortly, perhaps within this very news cycle!)

I'm betting the campaign will be long enough for "shortsighted" and "lying" to stick, though. The poster above who averred that Bush is “winning on Iraq” may be looking at a snapshot before Sistani weighed in. Certainly getting rid of Saddam was a good idea; you could hardly argue otherwise. But it will always remain possible for the Dems to argue that eliminating dictators is GOOD, but doing it multilaterally is NECESSARY. This will reverb quite far, because the polls split 70-30 for multilateralism in the run-up to the invasion, until the White House started claiming an immediate danger.

Most Americans feel much safer with multilateralism (not least because we are FROM all the other countries).

The fact that Bush now has to invite the U.N. to come back in and save his bacon doesn’t help him in this regard. The American public will welcome this, but prefer to get rid of the guy who needlessly caused all the death and ruckus. If Bush argues that a unilateral invasion was in “the national interest”, we may say “fine, okay this time”--but you’re too shortsighted to be trusted with it again.

And if Bush has to walk away from the oilfields (or further, the Shia government invites in French oil companies, and denominates in euros), even the hardcore conservatives will walk away from him, too. They’ll stay home like they did in ‘92. He’ll be a stinker, just like his old man.

Look for the Administration to suddenly find the corpse of Bin Laden around mid-September, his boney old fingers clutching a copy of TV Guide...

Edwards' "Two Americas" speech was a classic statement of Democratic Party values: we are the party of the not rich yet, who remember that we are responsible for all of us, rich or poor.

In the last election the Republicans apparently persuaded a lot of us that we were rich because we had $50,000 in the stock market, or the bank, but their handling of the economy and of foreign affairs should show people forcefully that their only true constituency is the greedy rich.

All of the major Democratic candidates realize this, and with all of them saying it over and over, maybe it will stick, all the way to the election, despite the best efforts of the corporatists.

Mr. Giraud asks, "Why is everyone calling it a concession speech? There's no need for Dean to concede anything at this point."

The reason everyone is calling it a concession speech is that in it he conceded that he had come in 3rd behind 2 other candidates. He needed to do this because he came in 3rd behind 2 other candidates.

Mr Lee, ( my honorable colleague from the fine state of ...) a concession speech is usually given only when an actual election for office is lost.

Do you suppose the people Dean was speaking to didn't know that Dean didn't get the most delegates?

Do you think Dean should have ignored his workers and tailored his message for the omnipresent media? When is it safe for him to pump up the team?

Calling it a "concession speech" is the same kind of rhetorical trick as the NYTimes calling Dean an "insurgent," a word usually reserved for terrorists.