Don’t get caught flat-footed in front of the
press! Below is a quick rundown of today’s “must reads.” – John T.
Doolittle, House Republican Conference Secretary
2. Terrorists'
Excuse du Jour - Salt Lake Tribune Op-ed
If you've ever stood up to a bully, you know how this works. Confrontation
tends to increase the chances of violence in the short term but decreases
its likelihood in the long term. Iraq is the excuse du jour for jihadists,
but before Iraq it was Afghanistan. Does that mean we shouldn't have toppled
the Taliban?
3. Goldilocks
and the Dow - Chicago Tribune
Six years after the dotcom bomb, five years after the worst terrorist attack
on U.S. soil, American investors and consumers are showing they're bullish
on the future of the U.S. economy.
4. In Close Races, Local
Issues Still Dominate - Washington Post
Though the campaigns have been jousting for months, it is clear in
interviews that, six weeks before Election Day, most voters are just
starting to tune in. Good luck to those who want to tune out.
1. Can the Democrats Beat Bush's
BeliefsWith Poll Politics? - Wall Street Journal Op-ed
September 29, 2006; Page A16
When pundits confronting the modern sport of extreme politics want to step
back from it all, a favored tactic is to ask: What would a man from Mars
think? The spectacle currently on display for the man from Mars is a
full-throttle election-year fight over the meaning of national security. The
Democrats want voters to view the November election through the fogged and
bloody prism of the war in Iraq; Republicans want voters at 30,000 feet with
a war on terror spread to the horizon.
We don't need the proverbial man from Mars to assess the fight between
Democrats and Republicans over national security. Over the past year, I've
exchanged messages with several American soldiers in Iraq, now a planet in
our political system, and I asked one recently for his opinion of the
political landscape back home. He sounded like he might prefer Mars.
"We are very cut off from big political debates here," he said. "We have
access to email and the Internet, but as a ground combat arms guy, my pace
precludes the close following of national political news that I enjoyed
prior to deploying, so I can't say that these debates weigh heavily on us."
Thank God for that.
It is difficult to imagine that the U.S. soldiers in Iraq would regard the
political debate back home as measuring up to the seriousness of what they
do every day. How would you like to roll out of your bunk in al Anbar
province, Mosul or Baghdad on a Sunday morning and read across the top of
the local U.S. paper that everything you've done in Iraq for three years has
merely made the terrorism threat worse? You just might lose heart a notch, a
dangerous thing when fighting a war.
But at this late stage of the campaign, Iraq-as-failure has become the
central narrative in the Democrats' strategy. A memo sent out to Democrats
last week by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, a strategy group led by former
Clinton pollster Stan Greenberg, discusses Mr. Bush's "failure in Iraq,
which energized Democrats and dispirited Republicans." It urges Democrats:
"On Iraq, stress Bush/GOP 'mismanagement' and need for a 'new direction.'"
There is general agreement in Democratic circles that the party made a
mistake by not confronting the national-security issue more forcefully in
2002 and 2004. Paul Begala cited the two elections on the "Today" show
Monday and said al Qaeda is "coming back to get us because of the failed
policies of George Bush."
Greenberg Quinlan Rosner says it has polled each element of this strategy,
and that the poll numbers suggest public support for these Democratic
positions. A poll-certified national-security strategy just might work with
the out-of-sorts 2006 electorate. But there was a reason for 2002 and 2004.
Those Democrats who did get elected channeled their energies into denouncing
the Bush antiterror programs and backing the Lamont Insurrection. So there's
a problem with the current hand-the-war-to-us strategy: Their hearts and
minds really aren't in it. They don't want the war.
No one doubts that George Bush's war on terror is based in belief and
principle. Yes indeed, many Democrats say this is precisely the problem. But
voters are going to have to make a net judgment between these two variations
on a theme. What's before them?
On the GOP side, they've seen George Bush give three major policy speeches
this month, pushing the Bush Doctrine with commitment and consistency. Today
Congress may send for his signature the bill he sought on terrorist
detainees.
The Democrats are back in the national-security game alright, but the
playbook is opinion polling first, with belief a second option. One result
is their national-security offensive has taken on a surreal unseriousness.
A fortnight ago, the big political story suddenly became ABC's
made-for-television movie, "The Path to 9/11." Out of the woods to dominate
the news cycle came the ghosts from the Clinton past -- Sandy Berger,
Madeleine Albright -- condemning the film as a slander on their long years
before the antiterror mast. Up to this point, Democratic candidates had
seemed to be surfing smoothly toward control of the House on waves of bad
media news out of Iraq. Suddenly they've got to deal with a movie suggesting
we're in Iraq because their president failed to pull the trigger on Osama
bin Laden.
This sideshow culminated last Sunday morning in a bizarre exchange between
Bill Clinton and Chris Wallace of Fox -- Mr. Clinton wagging a familiar
finger at Mr. Wallace and accusing the anchorman of smirking at him.
Personally, I think Mr. Wallace generally looks bemused, which is a distant,
more innocent cousin of the smirk. Bill O'Reilly, now there's a big-league
smirk.
Some pundits surmised that the Clinton eruption was planned to rally the
liberal base, depressed at the sight of bad Bush's approval rating crawling
back above 40%, and rising. This was Bill Clinton so my guess is it was both
-- planned and over the top. The fact is, the Democrats found themselves
back in Afghanistan with Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright, rather than
where they wanted the news to be, amid Baghdad's bombs. A messy week.
Then came the leaked NIE story in the New York Times this past Sunday. What
a bombshell. This would put them back on message: Iraq as failure. But by
now it's evident that the whole workweek invested in the National
Intelligence Estimate story was a colossal waste of the time devoted to it.
What began Sunday as the Times's towering bonfire -- 16 intel agencies and
12 anonymous sources writing off Iraq -- by Wednesday had burned down to
embers.
After the White House released the NIE summary late Tuesday afternoon,
reporters reading it for the first time on the Web undoubtedly kept hitting
the Page Down button on their PCs. This is it!? Three crummy pages that
anyone could have boiled down from a Foreign Affairs "Wither Iraq?"
symposium.
The Democrats' problem is this: They are trying to beat policy with politics
and weaken belief with polls. This may work for Social Security. I don't
think it works with war. Don't be surprised if come November, Democrats are
still on message -- Iraq as failure -- and still in the minority.
2. Terrorists' Excuse du Jour - Salt
Lake Tribune Op-ed
By Jonah Goldberg
Of course the war in Iraq has made us less safe, and I didn't need the
National Intelligence Estimate to tell me so. Who could possibly deny that
Iraq has become, in the words of the NIE, a "cause celebre" for jihadists?
One need only read the newspaper to conclude that Iraq is spawning more
terrorists. (Indeed, one fears that all the NIE authors did was clip from
the newspapers.)
If you've ever stood up to a bully, you know how this works. Confrontation
tends to increase the chances of violence in the short term but decreases
its likelihood in the long term. Any hunter will tell you that the most
dangerous moment is when you've cornered an animal, and any cop will tell
you that standing up to muggers puts you in danger. American colonists were
less safe for standing up to King George III, and the United States was
certainly safer in the short term when we stood on the sidelines while
Germany was conquering Europe. Heck, we would have been safer in the short
run if we'd responded to Pearl Harbor by telling the Japanese they could
have the Pacific to themselves.
After 9/11, there were voices on the left warning that an attack on
Afghanistan would only perpetuate the dreaded "cycle of violence." Today,
Democrats tout their support of that "good" war as proof they aren't soft on
terrorism. Fair enough, I suppose. But guess what? That war made us less
safe too -- if the measure of such things is "creating more terrorists." A
Gallup poll taken in nine Muslim nations in February 2002 found that more
than three-fourths of respondents considered the liberation of Afghanistan
unjustifiable. A mere 9 percent supported U.S. actions. That goes for
famously moderate Turkey, where opposition to the U.S. ran three to one, and
in Pakistan, where a mere one in 20 respondents took the American side.
In other words, before Iraq became the cause celebre of jihadists,
Afghanistan was. Does that mean we shouldn't have toppled the Taliban?
Going back further, it's conventional wisdom that we helped "create" Osama
bin Laden, or his Taliban and mujahedin comrades, when we supported the
Afghan resistance to the Soviet Union. So we shouldn't have done that
either?
Every serious analysis of the Islamic world today describes a genuine
tectonic shift in a vast civilization, an upheaval that cuts across social,
religious and demographic lines. This phenomenon dwarfs transient issues
such as the Iraq war. Are we to believe that once-moderate and relatively
secular Morocco is slipping toward extremism because we toppled Baathist
Saddam Hussein? Do we believe that the mobs who burned Danish embassies in
response to a cartoon wouldn't have done so if only President Bush had gone
for the 18th, 19th or 20th U.N. resolution on Iraq? Millions of young men
yearning for meaning and craving outlets for their rage would have become
computer programmers and dental hygienists if only Hussein's statue still
towered over central Baghdad? Would the pope's comments spark nothing but
thoughtful and high-minded debate from the Arab street if only Al Gore or
John Kerry were in office?
Iraq is the excuse du jour for jihadists. But the important factor is that
these are young men looking for an excuse. If you live your life calculating
that it's a mistake to do anything that might prompt murderers and savages
to act like murderers and savages, you've basically decided to live under
their thumb and surrender your civilization in the process.
For me, the truly dismaying news this week didn't come from the NIE but from
the German media. A German opera house announced that it would cancel its
staging of Mozart's "Idomeneo" because Berlin police concluded that staging
the opera -- which includes a scene in which Jesus, Buddha, Poseidon and
Muhammad are beheaded -- would pose an "incalculable security risk" from
jihadists. Germany, recall, proudly opposed the Iraq war -- but still
narrowly missed a Spain-style terrorist attack on its rail system this
summer.
A leading Muslim spokesman in Germany explained that he was all for free
speech, as long as it didn't offend Muslims. The Germans' all-too-typical
appeasement of terrorism no doubt makes them "safer" and "creates" fewer
terrorists.
And all it cost them -- for now -- is Mozart.
You can write to Jonah Goldberg by e-mail at JonahsColumn@aol.com.
The next time you hear someone complain about the state of the U.S. economy,
you might point out that the Dow Jones industrial average is right on the
edge of setting an all-time high. And this time around, the stock market is
reflecting solid underlying growth. It isn't soaring like a helium balloon
untethered to reality like it was the last time the Dow reached this lofty
level, 6 1/2 years ago.
The Dow closed Thursday at 11,718, just a hair below the all-time record of
11,722. The broader Standard & Poor's 500 stock index has risen 72 percent
since hitting its low point four years ago. Even the battered Nasdaq has
more than doubled in that time. The healthy state of the stock market means
investors have weighed the alternatives and are betting on the ability of
U.S. companies to make them money.
If that's not enough to warrant breaking out the bubbly, then point to this:
Since the brief 2001 recession, the American economy has created more than 5
million jobs and grown 15 percent in real terms (that is, factoring out the
effects of inflation). Inflation is still running a little on the high side,
3.8 percent a year. But one of the chief drivers of that--the surging price
of energy--is abating. Oil prices have dropped to about $60 a barrel from
more than $78 earlier this year. The average price of a gallon of regular
gasoline in the Chicago area has dropped nearly 58 cents in the last month,
to $2.58.
The burst of the housing bubble has plenty of people worried, but so far it
has not rippled through the economy. Housing starts have dropped about 20
percent. That makes this a medium-sized contraction after five scorching
years of housing growth and appreciation. That's about the size of the
decline in housing starts in 1991 and is nowhere near the 50 percent drop
from 1978 to 1982. The bursting of the housing bubble may be painful to
anyone who borrowed to the hilt at the market peak and has to sell at a
lower price. But there are signs that the worst of the steep slide in
housing may be over. Just a day after it was reported that home prices fell
in August, the first monthly decline in 11 years, came news that new home
sales posted their biggest gain in five months.
We are enjoying a Goldilocks economy, not too hot and not too cold. American
consumers remain remarkably confident about the future and continue to spend
money, according to the Conference Board's latest consumer confidence
survey. They've been buoyed by the drop in gas prices and believe there are
jobs available--not without reason, unemployment remains relatively low at
4.7 percent. They believe their incomes will rise in coming months.
Six years after the dotcom bomb, five years after the worst terrorist attack
on U.S. soil, American investors and consumers are showing they're bullish
on the future of the U.S. economy.
4. In Close Races, Local Issues Still
Dominate - Washington Post
By Jim VandeHei and Chris Cillizza
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, September 29, 2006; A01
MORGANTOWN, W.Va., Sept. 28 -- Spend nine days traveling through one of this
year's most contested political regions and there is no mistaking the mood
of voters: They are angry.
Nor is there any doubting the mood of incumbent politicians: They are
anxious.
But it is a mistake to assume that anger and anxiety look and sound the same
in these coveted precincts as they do in Washington.
The debates over Iraq and President Bush shadow virtually every competitive
race, but they do not dominate the conversation -- which suits many
Democrats just fine. This month's intense debate over policy toward
terrorism detainees, meanwhile, carried hardly any echo at all.
Here is what has people talking in Kentucky's 3rd District: a new bridge
over the Ohio River that would ease traffic for Louisville residents. In
Indiana, voters are plenty steamed -- over the Republican governor's
decision to privatize a toll road that runs through or near the seats of
three embattled GOP representatives.
In Ohio's 6th District, visitors are likely to get an earful about what
might be called earmark-envy: Why residents of neighboring West Virginia are
getting a bigger slice of the federal budget pie.
The Washington Post logged a thousand miles traveling up the Ohio River
Valley, where nine of the nation's most competitive House districts are
clustered in a continuous line. The trip began in the tobacco fields of
Kentucky and ended in this college town. Interviews with voters, candidates
and operatives made plain why the old line about all politics being local is
a truism: It really is true.
This is not to say the Ohio River Valley is insulated from national debates.
They are clearly contributing to the uneasy mood evident in so many places
along the dividing line of the upper South and industrial Midwest, even if
that mood is often expressed in highly individualistic ways. Virtually every
Republican candidate said they are concerned about what a sour electorate
means for them on Nov. 7.
"I have never seen such anxiety," said Joy Padgett, a Republican running for
the Ohio seat being vacated by GOP Congressman Robert W. Ney, who has
pleaded guilty to corruption charges growing from the Jack Abramoff lobbying
scandal. "I believe that spills over onto the skepticism about virtually
everything."
This free-floating angst, she lamented, is influencing attitudes about the
economy, terrorism and politics in general.
If voters' snappishness is unmistakable, its impact remains far from clear.
Take Laurie Pitcock. She lives in Ney's district and said she is dismayed by
Republican inaction on environmental issues and other matters. Even so, she
said, "I am still proud to be a Republican."
Her reaction was a commonplace one in these nine districts -- people
expressed disgust with the Republican leadership in Washington but not
necessarily toward the Republicans representing them.
Against this ambiguous backdrop, Republicans and Democrats are pursuing two
very different strategies in this region.
Republicans all seem to be reading out of the same playbook. To a person,
they seek to localize the elections, and accuse Democrats of wanting to
raise taxes and put liberals -- a bad word in these culturally conservative
districts -- in charge of Congress. Voters are seeing a lot more of House
Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) in GOP-sponsored television ads than
of President Bush.
The National Republican Congressional Committee, for instance, is hitting
Democrat Brad Ellsworth -- an antiabortion and anti-gun-control candidate in
Indiana's 8th District -- for helping support an "extreme liberal."
"How can he possibly stop their liberal agenda?" the NRCC asks in an ad
blanketing the district. Similar ads are popping up in other races.
There is one hitch in this strategy. Unlike in some past elections,
Democrats have picked the kinds of candidates who have shown that they can
win in heartland districts. Their positions on abortion, same-sex marriage
and other fault-line issues are often indistinguishable from Republicans'.
Ellsworth has jumped out to a double-digit lead over GOP Rep. John N.
Hostettler while running ads that highlight his social conservatism. "I fit
the district well," Ellsworth said when asked the secret of his success.
"People appreciate my conservative values."
The Democratic strategy differs from district to district but features one
common theme: a need for change.
That appeal takes many forms, but in the Ohio River Valley races it is
focused especially on the nation's energy policies. Democrats argue that
Republicans have sold out the country for campaign cash from oil and gas
companies -- a move they say led to soaring prices at the pump.
"The government should not be subsidizing the most profitable corporations
in the history of the world," said Cincinnati City Council member John
Cranley, who is running against Rep. Steve Chabot (R). That argument might
have been more effective, however, when gas prices were topping $3 a gallon.
They have since dropped by almost a dollar in some places.
Particularly in the rural districts, Democrats and Republicans sound alike
when discussing Iraq. They lament strategic errors but oppose a speedy
withdrawal. But Democrats cite the war as evidence that a divided government
is essential to imposing accountability on the White House.
In Kentucky, Ken Lucas, a former Democratic representative seeking to return
to his old job, repeatedly criticizes first-term Rep. Geoff Davis (R) for
voting with Bush more than 95 percent of time. "You can send a robot to vote
the party line," Lucas said -- twice. Because the two candidates differ on
few issues, Lucas said, his race is likely to come down to voters' desire to
shake up Washington.
That anti-Washington message has real resonance in this part of the country,
where anyone who carries a Washington aura -- including out-of-town
reporters -- is viewed skeptically at first.
This is also a region where memories run long. Former Kentucky state Senate
president Joe Prather is a case in point. Prather, the Democratic candidate
in the 1994 special election in Kentucky 's 2nd District, refused to be
interviewed last week because of lingering resentment about a story written
by The Post 12 years before that he believes cost him the seat in Congress.
Mike Weaver, the Democratic candidate in this year's race in that district,
said he did not much trust the Washington media either.
Though the campaigns have been jousting for months, it is clear in
interviews that, six weeks before Election Day, most voters are just
starting to tune in. Good luck to those who want to tune out. In Louisville,
where the television market reaches into three competitive races, it is not
uncommon while watching the evening news to see a cascade of political ads,
uninterrupted by pitches for cars or soap.
Back in Ohio, as in other places, the air wars have a partisan edge, often
aimed at voters who insist this is not how they want elections to be waged.
"I'd love to get beyond party lines and get things done," said voter Laurie
Pitcock -- a wish not likely to be granted between now and Nov. 7.
5. Henry Hyde: 'A Lion of the Right' -
Human Events
by Rep. Mike Pence
Posted Sep 28, 2006
As this session of Congress draws to a close, so draws to a close also the
storied career of a lion of the right, Henry Hyde of Illinois.
As the chairman of several major committees at the center of repeated
national controversies, Henry Hyde, as members on both sides of the aisle
know, has been a paragon of dignity, civility and commitment to principle,
and I would add he has been a lion of the right to life, and this chamber
will miss his roar.
I'll offer legislation today to name the Rayburn International Relations
Committee room after this storied legislator, and I urge my colleagues to
support this measure.
When I think of Henry Hyde's career, I of think 'Ulysses' by Alfred Lord
Tennyson, who wrote:
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in the old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal-temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Let us honor this rare leader, and may God bless the golden years of the
gentleman from Illinois.