Great advice for the Democrats (but will they fucking listen?)

As I've said before, I have two pieces of vote-winning rhetoric to suggest to the Democrats:
1. Say you'll go after Osama Bin Laden if elected, unlike those pussy Republicans.
2. Say Americans are a big family, and like a family, we should take care of our own -- the middleclass, the soccer moms, students, poorer people -- and not just look after the rich, like the Republicans have done. If you're rich, vote Republican; if you're not, vote Democrat.

And one piece of posturing advice: come across like a beerdrinker, not a wine drinker (John Kerry was obviously a wine drinker).

Here are some other pieces of advice, similar and different.

1. Advice To Democrats: One Talking Point To Rule Them All (from rudepundit.blogspot.com)

Democrats are about to face an untold amount of fear and savagery in the upcoming Congressional races. Once the niceties of the primaries are done, the Republican campaign machine is going to go into overdrive in a way that'll make the Swift Boat Vet attacks look like flea bites. If you're a Democratic candidate and you've ever scratched your ass in public, you can be sure that a picture with your hand on your own ass will be spread around with the implication that you are gay because you like finger-on-keister action.

What Democrats need is a message that says, "We're not playing." The beauty of what Keith Olbermann has been doing lately on his MSNBC show Countdown is that he's made it safe for public figures to use a certain kind of rhetoric. When he says that Bush needs to hope for forgiveness (as he did last night ), he's put out language in to the air that can now be built upon, much like Rush Limbaugh did for the right (and, Christ, no, the Rude Pundit's not saying that Olbermann is the Limbaugh of the Left). But it's gotta be tailored, simple, easy to recite and easy to remember. And the Rude Pundit's got it.

Follow the bouncing ball, motherfuckers; it's gonna be a weird ride:

See, Republicans like to say that they are the party of personal responsibility. They're the ones who believe that if you give a man a fish, you feed him for one day (which is a reductionist view of welfare), but if you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime. Republicans think they are teaching. But their philosophy is actually something more along the lines of "You deal with your own shit. Suffer or learn. Sink or swim."

Liberals (which a couple of Democrats actually are) are the ones who wanna teach the guy to fish, but they also know (as the Rude Pundit's said before) that the guy needs a fishing pole, string, bait, and maybe a fish or two to eat while he's learning. That was the idea of the New Deal, the War on Poverty, and everything else that the right has undone. The liberal philosophy says we know you wanna deal with shit on your own, but we recognize that it's a path to get there and you might need some help along the way.

This gets us, through a bizarre, fucked-up route, back to fear. Republicans have to sow fear again and again, but they don't give anyone the tools to deal with the fear other than to demand that the citizens become dependent on the government for safety and parental oversight. What were Bush's speeches last week except a series of statements on what there is to be afraid of and how we should be scared enough to hide while the government takes care of all the monsters under the bed.

Democrats need to counter that message not by saying that they'll be better parents - that they won't fuck the neighbors or they won't blow the bank account on high-quality smack. No, instead, they need to offer a message that appeals to the American desire to have the guts to stand up to bullies big and small; a message that says that your vote doesn't have to confirm your fears, but it can be a method of saying that you're not afraid anymore. So howzabout this one:

"Don't let Osama Bin Laden tell you how to vote."

Focus group that motherfucker. It becomes shorthand for the bullshit hysteria the Republicans have wanted to provoke. It reminds people that Bin Laden is still out there without explicitly saying it. It says that for the last two elections, the American people have voted because Bin Laden scared them into voting a certain way. It evokes the constant quoting of Bin Laden that Bush has been doing, quotes that'll certainly be echoed by the media and by congressional candidates.

Look at this short speech segment that's possible: "My opponent has said that Osama Bin Laden wants to destroy America. My opponent wants you to be very scared. He says that's why you should vote for him. Well, I say to the people here in [insert podunk town, USA], 'Don't let Osama Bin Laden tell you how to vote.'"

One simple message, Democrats. One that'll echo in people's ears as they go to the polls where they can see the act of voting as an act of defiance, of Bin Laden, of Bush.


2. How To Turn A Red State Blue – by Staci Schoff (from Blogcritics & stacischoff.blogspot.com “A Mommy with an Attitude”)


Having grown up in rural Indiana followed by Arizona (two red states – some of my best friends and family are right-wing nuts), I’ve noticed that liberals often misunderstand why there are so many red states. They’re always particularly baffled about why poor and working class people would vote republican. And as I was watching a poorly done documentary about Fox News, it occurred to me that as a former insider, I could clear up some of those misunderstandings and then perhaps we could work a little smarter and get some Democrats elected this November (and in 2008) for a change.

Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism, directed by Robert Greenwald (director of the well-made and compelling Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price ), is the result of the collaboration of a group of liberals at their most ineffective and pathetic. It even tops the “vote for anyone but Bush… even namby pamby John Kerry” fiasco of 2004, if you can imagine. The documentary tells the tale of a few disgruntled reporters who claim that Fox News has a clear and direct conservative bias. Sure, and that's news to whom?

Fox News is complete propaganda, but is there really anyone who doesn’t know that? They’re given too much credit when someone assumes that they’re creating public opinion, and their viewers don’t receive enough credit when they’re dismissed as idiots. There are a lot of conservative people out there, even some who are smart and some who are educated. They watch Fox News because it’s entertaining, and because it affirms what they already believe.

Actually, I enjoy watching a little Fox News myself. It’s amusing and absurd, and I find it hard to believe that very many people don’t know that. But I’m not really offended by it. I know when I turn it on that I’m going to see a glowing report of George Bush, and likewise I know that when I read Mother Jones Journal I’m going to read negative press about him. I like to read Mother Jones for the same reason a conservative person likes to watch Fox News, because I often nod my head in agreement or learn something I didn’t already know that seems perfectly reasonable. Not because I need to be told what to think.

Unless the liberal and leftist press and ideas are somehow being suppressed (and evidently they’re not - enter Greenwald's useless, sniveling DVD about the evil Rupert Murdoch) the Democrats who want to win elections could perhaps take a lesson or two from what the Republicans and Fox News are doing right, whether they like what they’re doing or not.

Here are a few highlights of what they might learn:

Bumper stickers that say, “Vote Republican it’s easier than thinking,” are not helpful. They only reinforce Rush Limbaugh (king of “overstating the case”) as he routinely informs his listeners about how dumb they’re perceived to be by the “elitist left.”

When discussing homosexuality, you’ll find most rural and working class folks firmly in the “mind your own business” camp. But suggest the public schools use their tax money to “educate” their children about it, and I’m afraid all bets are off. A good article in the New York Times recently discussed how social liberals have taken over the Democratic party and alienated blocks of voters. These social issues are important, but they’re not necessarily popular; so to champion them at the expense of your core constituents may be noble, but it certainly isn’t smart.

Wondering aloud why those poor, stupid, rural people “vote against their economic interests” is not useful. I’ve never met a rural or working class person who doesn’t know that Republicans cater to rich conservatives. But what they also know (and evidently liberal journalists do not) is that the Democratic party caters to rich liberals. It is insulting to assume that because people aren’t wealthy, they don’t recognize this. No one is more acutely aware of the iniquity of the distribution of wealth than the people with the short end of the stick. But while the Democrats are making them feel like helpless, lazy idiots, the Republicans are building them up as the backbone of America. Conservatives are appealing to their sense of dignity and pride. And that’s why they’re winning elections. The Democrats would do well to make a note of it.

It’s not a good idea to assume that all of the “poor, uneducated people” who don’t agree with the liberal party line are obviously just sheep swallowing Republican nonsense. I’m sorry, but people don’t conform to the liberal agenda just so they can be considered as smart and enlightened as Al Franken or Michael Moore. As if there are no liberal “sheep.” Please.

This is who Americans like to vote for: the strong guy who says, “I’ve got things under control, everything is going to be fine.” Did we not learn anything from Jimmy Carter’s presidency? People don’t want to see Jimmy Carter sitting in his sweater turning the thermostat down to sixty-eight degrees while he whinges on and on about the gloom and doom of the energy crisis. They want to hear Ronald Reagan say, “America is wonderful , Americans are great , the economy is fine , so fine in fact, I think I’ll take a vacation.”

Why? Your guess is as good as mine, but there it is. Put it to good use.

If your competitor is excelling at something, do learn from them, go forth and do likewise. Don't make a worthless, whiney documentary about how mean you think they are.

Finally (and most importantly), choose a good candidate. The emasculated John Kerry? Not going to work. And that wife of his? Sweet Jesus, if he didn’t already seem sissified enough, she pretty much finished it off. And begging people to vote for some weak Democrat just because he’s not George Bush? Listen, I’m liberal from the word go, but I’m not an idiot.


3.The GOP, RIP
They're on the way out – and good riddance

For a good 75 years, the Republican Party has been the party of conservatism , the anointed vehicle for the hopes and dreams of those who believe in limited government and seek to preserve the legacy of the Founding Fathers .

No more.

It hasn't been true for quite a while , but at least the Republicans were rhetorically committed to conservative principles right up until the second Bush presidency. George W. campaigned on a platform that old-time conservatives found at least recognizable: he opined that Americans ought to be able to keep a larger proportion of their income than the Clinton regime found permissible, and even on foreign affairs he sounded like a Taft Republican of the old school, promising a more " humble " foreign policy.

How far we have wandered off that road!

Under George W. Bush , today's GOP is in the vanguard of the biggest expansion of governmental power since 27 B.C. , the year Octavian was crowned with laurel leaves in the Roman Senate , and the yeoman's republic on the Tiber morphed into an Empire .

Government spending has not only increased, it has engulfed us in a veritable tidal wave of unsustainable debt and force-marched us to the brink of bankruptcy . More ominously, the coercive power of government has expanded exponentially , and basic civil liberties – the right to a fair trial ,the right to be secure in our own homes ,the right to speak out against government policies without being harassed ,spied on , and otherwise encumbered by said government – are in danger.

If, on the home front, the Republicans represent a brazen authoritarianism that seeks the overthrow of the Constitution, on the foreign policy front they are also revolutionaries. Professor Claes Ryn , the noted conservative scholar and past president of the Philadelphia Society , calls them " Jacobins ," after the French revolutionaries who sent so many of their enemies to the guillotine . The Jacobins sought the revolutionary transformation of society via a purifying violence , and their brief rule was a paroxysm of nihilistic carnage unprecedented in the history of European nations. The neoconservatives , with their self-proclaimed objective of " creative destruction ," are playing a similarly sadistic game in the Middle East today. Having seized the reins of government in Washington and commandeered the U.S. military in the service of their hubris ,the neocons are on the march, like Orcs gathering at Isengard , shrieking their war cries and shaking their spears – first at Iraq , and now at Iran .

I won't go into the history of how the neocons migrated from the Democratic Party to the GOP, since that subject has been covered, here and elsewhere , in mind-numbing detail . Everybody knows about the neocons by now: Alcove B , the Trotskyist Irving Kristol and his fellow apostates, James Burnham and Max Shachtman , the infiltration of the Democratic Party by Shachtman and his confreres, and their effective control over the so-called "Scoop" Jackson wing of the party. Their own whining and complaining memoirs, of which there are far too many, have informed us of their reasons for abandoning their historic home and migrating to the GOP.

It was the Vietnam War , and the whole issue of what foreign policy is best suited to the U.S., that precipitated their break with the mainstream of their party. The neocons – grouped around Commentary magazine, and, in the alternate universe of left-liberal politics, around Social Democrats, USA – stomped out of the Democratic Party when that party rejected the failed policies of Lyndon Baines Johnson. In rallying around the candidacy of Eugene McCarthy , and later, George McGovern , the party's activist core rejected the Cold War liberalism that had prompted John F. Kennedy to mount the Bay of Pigs invasion – and vaingloriously declare that we would " pay any price, bear any burden " in the service of an interventionist foreign policy devoted to upholding " freedom " around the world.

Boring old hypocrites like Hubert Horatio Humphrey –a hero to the neocons – foundered on the rocks of the Vietnam conflict, and the pro-war AFL-CIO, long a bastion of neocon-Shachtmanite influence, had already passed the apex of its power. Their policies discredited, their political fortunes in ruins, the neocons retreated to the tall grass and regrouped to fight another day. The first stage of their strategy for a protracted conflict was a complete ideological makeover, a radical transfiguration that would catapult them to the opposite side of the political spectrum – but without, of course, in any way altering their core principle : devotion to the cult of the war god. Militarism , not only as a foreign policy but as the organizing principle of the domestic order, is the central doctrine of the neoconservative creed , and they have never betrayed it no matter what their party registration.

The neocons, in their takeover of what used to be the conservative movement, have Prussianized the GOP. The movement of Taft and Goldwater , of the Chambers of Commerce and the Rotarians of the old America where prudence and modesty, rather than revolution and grandiosity , were in style, is no more. In its place is a party that stands for what the neocons call " national greatness ," which derides prudence as cowardice , and knows nothing of modesty . Their role model is no longer Barry Goldwater , who questioned such government-guaranteed entitlements as Social Security, but Otto von Bismarck , whose name is a byword for militarism – and who introduced a government welfare scheme similar to our own Social Security system well before the New Deal came to America.

For libertarians, the GOP is a total loss : like the neocons and the old "Scoop Jackson" Democrats, they are bad on everything , including domestic policy . Today, whatever skeptics of the government's power to effect positive change, at home and abroad, still exist inside the Republican Party are lonely guardians of a nearly forgotten tradition. This is the party of Big Government , and Big Ambitions overseas: in the new Bushian GOP we are witnessing the triumph of " National Greatness " Republicanism. Gone is the plain, republican cloth coat: in its place GOPers flaunt the imperial purple.

Libertarians no longer have any place in the GOP coalition, and any who remain will have long since betrayed their ostensible devotion to liberty. The Republican Party is today hopelessly authoritarian . Maddened by war, its leaders are so corrupted by power and their desperation to hold on to it, that they will resort to any tactic ,any subterfuge , no matter how contemptible and/or self-defeating . A good example is their secret funding of the campaign of Democrat Joe Lieberman against their own candidate for U.S. Senate in Connecticut. As Insight magazine reports, the GOP's Karl Rove steered millions of dollars from big Republican contributors into Lieberman's coffers.

Lieberman, an advocate of Big Government and out-of-control spending if ever there was one, supported the president on the Iraq war question and has signed on to the campaign to provoke a similar conflict with Iran. His defeat in the Democratic primary at the hands of Ned Lamont was a big blow to the War Party. It marked the effective end of neoconservative influence within the party of Jefferson , and represented a real setback for the neocon strategy of effectively controlling the foreign policy stances of both major parties – a maneuver that has worked well in peacetime, but is always frayed as the consequences of our interventionist policies come back to haunt us in the form of body bags .

Republican support for a dyed-in-the-wool statist like Lieberman is proof positive that the GOP leadership could care less about their ostensible principles when it comes to domestic policy. In truth, they care about one issue and one issue only: the war, including the one to come . In supporting Lieberman, they are, in effect, saying: To hell with less government. We'll settle for more war!

As Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos , the founding father of " netroots " Democratic activism, has said , there is room for libertarians in the Democratic Party – and especially now, when the Libertarian Party has thrown its wonderful platform overboard and adopted a self-consciously "pragmatic" stance that has rendered it indistinguishable from the majors. If anyone is skeptical of government power and its dangerous increase in the era of Bush, he or she is probably a Democrat.

This skepticism of government power is particularly sharp when it comes to critiquing American foreign policy. Although there is a growing contingent of Republican critics of the war, in Congress and among the ranks, the Democratic Party activists who are the most energized are solidly opposed to our presence in Iraq. Significantly, many are extending their critique of intervention in that particular instance to a more generalized skepticism of our power to democratize the world at gunpoint.

This doubt of military power abroad is bound, in many cases, to translate into a similarly jaundiced view of the promiscuous employ of government coercion on the home front. Not always, but often – and certainly more often, as the years of the " war on terrorism " drag on and the proto-fascist Republicans launch fresh assaults on civil liberties.

The sad decline of the GOP into a party that could credibly be described as scary, if not outright fascist , is bound to depress many longtime Republicans, particularly those with libertarian inclinations. Yet I would not linger over this gravestone too long, mourning the demise of a tradition remembered by few. And it isn't all bad news, either. The good news is that the American people are not going to look with favor on a party that stands for perpetual war and eternal debt. Against all evidence and common sense, Republican leaders defend a war that has rightly been called the biggest strategic disaster in our history, one that even a full third of GOP voters reject as not worth fighting. Against the principles of their modern leaders and their own platform, they are the biggest promoters and enablers of government expansionism, a trend that has provoked a rebuke even from Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel , a potential presidential candidate and GOP stalwart with impeccable conservative credentials.

Republicans are headed for a drubbing at the polls, and it couldn't have happened to a more deserving party. Ever since the neocon takeover of this administration, they have been headed for disaster, and now that it is finally striking I just want to sit back and enjoy the spectacle of their extended and agonizing demise. That's right, " stay the course ," guys! Until you fall right into that inviting abyss…


4. OFF MESSAGE
After The Fall
By William Powers (from National Journal)

The media wisdom of the moment is that the GOP might just lose the House in November. The New York Times made it official earlier this week with a front-page lead story declaring, "Sixty-five days before the election, the signs of Republican vulnerability are widespread." At one point, the story referred to the situation as "a gathering storm" for the Republicans, unconsciously (or perhaps consciously) taking the administration's recent penchant for Churchillian allusion and throwing it back at them.

Elite journalists are pack creatures, and when the pack is moving one way, everyone else sort of slides in that direction.

This is how it goes lately between the White House and the press corps -- constant sniping and gibes, a battle fought largely between the lines. "You guys are a bunch of negative, nattering, pro-terrorist pinkos." "Oh yeah? Well you're gonna lose big-time in November."

Nobody says it exactly this way, but if you had a magic decoder ring and pointed it at the daily news cycle, that would be the translation.

So let's assume the latest oracular visions are correct and the GOP suffers a major defeat, something approaching if not matching the stunning Democratic losses of 1994. That would be the political equivalent of an earthquake. But would it have any implications for the media? Would it change the dynamic between the Bush team and the journalists who cover them?

Absolutely. And if the media are true to form, the most dramatic shift would not be in political journalism per se , but in coverage of the most important story of this moment: the Iraq war.

Journalists like to think they are reporting just the facts, straight and unaffected by circumstance. The story is the story is the story. In fact, news is a highly atmospheric product: The way a story is presented, framed, and played (up or down) depends heavily on matters beyond the facts themselves. In Washington, the balance of power between the parties on one hand and between the administration and the media on the other is a hidden but immensely important factor in determining how the news reads and sounds.

When the White House is riding high, as it was in early 2005 (the days of the Bush "mandate"), story lines that are implicitly critical of the administration don't get much of a ride. Elite journalists are pack creatures, and when the pack is moving one way, everyone else sort of slides in that direction.

This is especially true on a story where the stakes are as high as they are in this war, which threatens to consign Bush to the dreaded "failed presidents" file. Establishment media outlets are not reporting the story that way now -- not as forcefully as they might. Why? Because: 1) the war isn't over yet, and 2) despite the bad news that keeps happening in Iraq, the president's party still controls Washington.

This war is a debacle, and plenty of prominent journalists have written and said as much all over the media. One of the best-selling books in the nation right now is Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq , the war book by Washington Post reporter Thomas E. Ricks , whose title says it all. Still, if you follow the daily coverage, you'll see media outlets spending a lot of time tempering the basic reality of Iraq, with pulled punches, qualifiers, and other moves that make the fiasco seem a lot less fiasco-like.

Thus, The Times ' story about the "gathering storm" for Republicans shared the front page with a story about how in one corner of Iraq the death toll has been dropping, a development to which the GOP's most loathed media outlet actually applied the word "progress." For years now, mainstream outlets have been bending over backward to disprove administration critiques and show the upside of the war, minuscule though it is.

A November defeat for the Republicans will change everything. If Bush suffers a major political setback, the media will feel freed up to tear into this war as they have never done before. Again, it will not be a conscious, orchestrated decision -- there will be no covert meeting at which senior editors and producers conspire to declare Iraq an epic failure. But the pack will change direction, as it always does when it smells blood.

(William Powers is a columnist for National Journal magazine, where "Off Message" appears. His e-mail address is bpowers@nationaljournal.com)


5. Don't Look Back
Is the middle class worse off now than it was thirty years ago? That's the wrong question, and the wrong debate for progressives to be having.
By Matthew Yglesias

Economic punditry isn't my main focus, but for years now I've been somewhat baffled by liberals' commitment to a very specific story of gloom and doom about the American economy. Paul Krugman offered up the orthodox liberal view in his September 1 column, noting that "the real wage of nonsupervisory workers reached a peak in the early 1970s, at the end of the postwar boom," which "provides as good an argument as you could possibly want for a smart, bold populism."

In his contribution to an ongoing debate hosted by the Prospect on the subject, Stephen Rose from the Third Way disputes some of these numbers and suggests that, when parsed properly, the middle class is actually quite well off. Lawrence Mishel from the leftier Economic Policy Institute, in turn, disputes some of Rose's numbers . Were I to delve deep into the weeds of this controversy, I think I'd end up arguing that Rose has the better case. Indeed, he's managed not to even mention a couple of the best points for his side -- that the Consumer Price Index's failure to account for new goods winds up understating the extent to which prosperity grows over time, and that it's silly to look at the consequences of higher female labor force participation without considering the large increase in women's autonomy that it has entailed.

But delving into the weeds is exactly what I won't do, because I think this is the wrong debate to be having. Consider: Being a dull person, I managed to have a lengthy conversation on Friday night about this argument over living standards and prosperity with a libertarian friend of mine who works at the Cato Institute. Our views on this subject are very close. Our views on actual policy ideas are radically different. That latter debate -- what is to be done? -- is the debate that matters, and the two questions appear to be almost entirely unrelated. Rose's article, for example, completely lost me at the end when he offers a few policy prescriptions. He suggests that we "look at the characteristics of the top income quintile and use public policy to replicate that success." Specifically, rich people in America "are much more likely to have finished college, and they are much more likely to be in married, two-earner families." Rose, therefore, proposes tax breaks for people who have the characteristics of high-income Americans as a good way to "move more people up the ladder."

That's a slightly bizarre idea. Yes, if you give tax breaks to people who have the characteristics of high-income people you will help a certain number of people on the margin to move from not having those characteristics to having them. But mostly, you'll be handing out tax breaks to people who already have the characteristics of rich people, which is to say you'll be giving tax breaks to rich people. That's a bad idea. The badness of the idea, moreover, has nothing to do with whether or not middle-class wages have been stagnating. It has to do with the fact that giving preferential tax treatment to income spent on college tuition is regressive tax policy -- the last thing the country needs in a time of growing income inequality.

Indeed, if you look at it, almost nothing in the Third Way's set of middle-class policy proposals has any relationship to the analysis that allegedly drives it. Some of their proposals -- "put more cops on the street," for example -- are good and important. Others, like a 25 percent "smut tax" on Internet porn, seem like smart but utterly trivial politics. "A generous middle-class college tuition tax deduction" is, as I said, a bad idea. Similarly, a "$1,500 tax credit for first-time homebuyers" is mostly an upward redistribution of wealth to a group of people who already enjoy very favorable treatment from the tax code. "Doubl[ing] the tax break for child care expenses" is much closer to the mark, but the goal they have in mind here probably shouldn't be accomplished through the tax code. Why not a flat-rate child care voucher for all parents? How about a federal universal preschool program?

Conversely, the big thing for which liberals have been agitating in this country for decades is a rational health-care system. What they have in mind is a fair system that provides universal coverage, which would bring great benefits both to the economy and to public health. It's a good idea. And it's absurd for Third Way to put forward a progressive economic agenda without even addressing the need for health-care reform. But, again, the great analytic debate about living standards over the last several decades has no bearing on this issue. Liberals wanted universal health care back in the alleged salad days of the early 1970s, and we still want it now. The reason we wanted it then is the same as the reason we want it now: not because wages are stagnating, but simply because such systems are superior to the odd patchwork we currently suffer from in the United States.

Liberals have a very good argument to make against both our conservative adversaries and our centrist quasi-friends. The essence of the argument is that the sort of government programs we favor will improve living conditions for the broad bulk of Americans. This remains a goal worth accomplishing whether or not it's the case that the broad bulk of Americans are already doing pretty well in life. Nobody, no matter how well they're doing, is averse to doing somewhat better if they can be convinced that there's a way to do so. Conversely, no matter how dissatisfied someone might be with the status quo , he won't vote for change unless he's convinced the change will be for the better.

And that is the argument we should be having. Are liberals' big, bold ideas good ones, or are they unsound? Should they be rejected in favor of a centrist grab bag of tax deductions, or the conservative mania for rate reductions? I think most of liberals' big, bold ideas are good ones, and that a forthright argument in their favor can appeal to the poor and to the somewhat prosperous, to the optimistic and to the depressed. Quibbling about numerical comparisons across the decades is neither here nor there, and not something progressive politics' best minds should be wasting their time on.


6. In Search of Accurate Vote Totals (NYTimes Editorial)

It's hard to believe that nearly six years after the disasters of Florida in 2000, states still haven't mastered the art of counting votes accurately. Yet there are growing signs that the country is moving into another presidential election cycle in disarray.

The most troubling evidence comes from Ohio, a key swing state, whose electoral votes decided the 2004 presidential election. A recent government report details enormous flaws in the election system in Ohio's biggest county, problems that may not be fixable before the 2008 election.

Cuyahoga County, which includes Cleveland, hired a consulting firm to review its election system. The county recently adopted Diebold electronic voting machines that produce a voter-verified paper record of every vote cast. The investigators compared the vote totals recorded on the machines after this year's primary with the paper records produced by the machines. The numbers should have been the same, but often there were large and unexplained discrepancies. The report also found that nearly 10 percent of the paper records were destroyed, blank, illegible, or otherwise compromised.

This is seriously bad news even if, as Diebold insists, the report overstates the problem. Under Ohio law, the voter-verified paper record, not the voting machine total, is the official ballot for purposes of a recount. The error rates the report identified are an invitation to a meltdown in a close election.

The report also found an array of other problems. The county does not have a standardized method for conducting a manual recount. That is an invitation, as Florida 2000 showed, to chaos and litigation. And there is a serious need for better training of poll workers, and for more uniform voter ID policies. Disturbingly, the report found that 31 percent of blacks were asked for ID, while just 18 percent of others were.

Some of these problems may be explored further in a federal lawsuit challenging Ohio's administration of its 2004 election. Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, who has been criticized for many decisions he made on election matters that year, recently agreed to help preserve the 2004 paper ballots for review in the lawsuit.

Ohio is not the only state that may be headed for trouble in 2008. New York's Legislature was shamefully slow in passing the law needed to start adopting new voting machines statewide. Now localities are just starting to evaluate voting machine companies as they scramble to put machines in place in time for the 2007 election. (Because of a federal lawsuit, New York has to make the switch a year early.) Much can go wrong when new voting machines are used. There has to be extensive testing, and education of poll workers and voters. New York's timetable needlessly risks an Election Day disaster.

Cuyahoga County deserves credit for commissioning an investigation that raised uncomfortable but important questions. Its report should be a wake-up call to states and counties nationwide. Every jurisdiction in the country that runs elections should question itself just as rigorously, and start fixing any problems without delay.