10:54 am | New York City

'Goodbye Superman' Edition

We can tender only our apologies for being absent last week. The editorial staff of the BWA Campaign Blog was laid low by what seemed to be a head cold, but gradually revealed itself to be an illness of SARS-like dimensions. We spent the better part of four days on the living-room sofa, watching the McLaughlin Group and ‘Sex in the City’. It’s possible that this is something we picked up on the subway, but more likely that our iron constitution succumbed to some rare and virulent poison planted in our burrito last Thursday by the serpent-hearted operatives of the Heritage Foundation.

We have returned to the very razor’s edge of political commentary with our knives drawn, however. It was a busy week, and there was a lot of bad ugliness afoot. We can say with some satisfaction that the election facing us appears to be a genuine contest between conflicting ideologies, and the debates on Tuesday and Friday nights only served to bear that out. It has kind of a history-in-the-making, Williams Jennings Bryant feel to it; a struggle between those who believe in Protestant, God-fearing America and those who believe in humanism and the deeper truth of science and reason. Perhaps we are overstating the case, but not by much.

The numbers are swinging back toward the middle, and most of the more recent polls appearing in the respectable media have Bush and Kerry in a statistical tie. Since we derided the national polls when Kerry was down, it would be poor form to flap our lips about them now. What truly heartens us, however, is the electoral vote counts kept by the more wise and bespectacled political professionals. Bush dropped below the magic number (270) for the first time last week, and things looked even better over the weekend:

Electoral Vote Count (Hotline Scoreboard)
Bush: 218 (26 states)
Kerry: 245 (19 states)

The people with the hearts of pig-iron and the morals of bait-sharks who seriously handicap these things for a living consider only about half a dozen states to be seriously in contention. The true believer in us finds that irksome and cheap, but we are, above all, a professional, so we accept the math.

The practical effect of this is to free the political parties up to quit playing nice. Mark our words. Now that they have no reason to impress the Philadelphia suburbs with their pleasant demeanors and neatly-pressed ties, Karl Rove's bloody fingerprints will be all over the president's next couple of speeches.

The only other development of note this weekend was the continued descent of Ralph Nader down a long and treacherous white slope into the black sea of madness. The Washington Post ran an op-ed by Nader this weekend in which he once again showed the vitality and rightness of his ideas:

Scan the major constituencies supporting Kerry -- environment, labor, minorities, consumers, civil justice, antiwar, peace groups, civil liberties -- and note the absence of any mandates pushing Kerry to take long-overdue stands and campaign on them. Notice that the corporate lobbies are not behaving in a similar fashion. In fact they pounced on Kerry's early remarks about corporate crime and welfare.

Daily the corporate supremacists pull Kerry -- through money, Wall Street advisers and sheer power -- in their direction. If the liberals do not demand from Kerry commitments in detail that pull him toward the necessities of the people, guess in which direction he will continue to move. If he wins the election without mandates, corporatist dogma will follow him decisively into the Oval Office.

At the same time, however, Nader proved the quixotic weirdness and doom-bent arc of his current political adventure: accepting campaign money from the anti-American and loathsome 'Swift Boat Veterans for Truth', continuing to focus his ballot efforts on crucial battleground states, calling John Edwards a "sniveling coward", and telling the Stamford Advocate that Kerry and Bush, as members of Skull & Bones, "presumably prefer each other in terms of advancing each other, recommending each other, appointing each other to public positions and enhancing each other's business deals."

Someone should check his meds.

1:17 pm | New York City

And, behold, two great dragons came forth ready to fight,
and their cry was great.
And at their cry all nations were prepared to battle,
that they might fight against the righteous people.
And lo a day of darkness and obscurity,
tribulation and anguish,
affliction and great uproar, upon the earth.
And the whole righteous nation was troubled,
fearing their own evils,
and were ready to perish.

The numbers look good for Kerry coming out of the weekend. A Newsweek poll has him slightly ahead, and the new Gallup poll has the race at a statistical tie. We wonder what the activist center-left types will make of that, since MoveOn.org spent all of last week explaining why Gallup was a biased right-wing outfit bent on the ruin of progressive America. We suspect they may be more forgiving this week.

As a partisan of some note, the BWA Campaign Blog is officially looking forward to this week. The second presidential debate goes down on Friday, and if Bush looked like a tiny and irritable man when attempting to defend his half-popular foreign policies, we can only imagine how he'll do when confronted with a discussion of his ruinous and near-anti-American domestic agenda. Why the Kerry campaign let this thing get scheduled for a Friday night is beyond us. We hope McCrurry had someone fired when he got there.

And tonight is the first and only debate between the vice-presidential candidates, heralded in the respectable media as being a VP debate of unprecedented significance. The Washington Post calls Cheney "arguably the most powerful vice president in history" and NPR referred to Edwards as having "anchorman hair" and "a sunny demeanor." A veritable clash of titans is in the offing.

But we are, by profession and nature, a doomsayer and gloom-merchant, here at the BWA Campaign Blog, and we can sense blood-letting in the wind. Cheney, unlike his boss, has an inner core of hammered iron, made black with the ancient blood of a hundred fallen foes, and he will not go down so easily as all that. Anchorman hair may be enough to swing votes in the hedge country, but this is serious business we are dealing with here.

From the Washington Post:

"[Cheney] has become the national security adviser," said David Rothkopf, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who interviewed more than two dozen administration officials for an upcoming history of the National Security Council. "Time after time, he has co-opted the leadership and policy-shaping role that the national security adviser or secretary of state usually has."

But Rothkopf said assertions by Cheney's detractors that he is a secretive puppetmaster, wreaking havoc on administration policy, are overblown. "He is not a monster. He is not Darth Vader," he said. "He is a very purposeful, thoughtful guy, but highly conservative to the point of being ideological."

Why is the comparison to Darth Vader so popular when discussing our vice-president? We used it ourself some weeks ago, and have since seen it in print several times. The respectable media have all gone completely gay for blogs, but we suppose it's unlikely that the BWA Campaign Blog is responsible for this trend. A more likely candidate may be Cheney's air of utter mercilessness. Or possibly the black cyborg armor he insists on wearing.

4:48 pm | New York City

'Post-Debate' Edition

The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason.

-- Hunter S. Thompson

The respectable media continue to revise recent history to fit their precious narrative structures. As of this morning, Kerry's campaign was floundering horribly in its death throes before the unstoppable juggernaut of Bush-Cheney 04 just days ago. Funny, no one mentioned it at the time. Well, we must forgive them. The air is bad in some of those offices, and the water is filled with noxious chemicals.

We have yet to encounter much in the way of wise post-debate analysis from the commentariat, but, to offset our wildly partisan remarks earlier today, we will turn this space over to "Deep Pockets", our 'Man on the Right', sort of:

But what I am saying is that you think it's a clear win because you already (a) like Kerry and (b) look at Bush's linguistic failings as analogous to his policies. There are plenty of people (about half the population of this country) who, as distasteful as you might find it, SUPPORT the president and his policies. They don't see Bush's sentence fumblings as having any bearing on the substance of his decisions.

It's all perception and neither of us are coming at it with an open mind. That said, I think you can chalk it up as a Kerry positive... I just don't think you can count it as a Bush negative.

He's true about the great, flailing masses, but we have faith that the better angels of our natures will prevail. Abraham Lincoln said that, and he was a Republican. And a hell of a speech-writer besides. The only other serious feedback we received today came from our mother, who left a cryptic message on our voicemail a few hours ago:

How about that debate? War is hard work. That's all I have to say.

We suspect she is denigrating the president. Mr. Ashcroft, you will want to take note. She is a public school librarian, and an open-hearted American with strong feelings on gay rights, secularism and censorship. We assume this qualifies her for detention, and possible identity reassignment, but we are not certain.

11:12 am | New York City

We watched last night's debate in the company of a number of left-leaning young white people (our demographic cohort), many of whom were indulging in spirits, and all of whom feel that President Bush is a irritable, intellectually-dull man, and all of whom cheered when our leader said things that made him sound foolish. We were mindful of the 'cheerleader' effect of percieving the debate in such an environment, but we are pleased that the respectable media, as well as much of the mule-headed electorate, seems to be largely in agreement.

Most of the "insta-polls", as well as this morning's new coverage, have Kerry emerging as the debate winner. Whether or not this will translate into visible support remains to be seen, but we still have hope in the citizenry, and their eventual ability to recognize a bad seed. Three and a half years of exposure to this petty-minded, humorless fear-monger have taught us everything we could possible want to know about his "character", and a careful reading of his administration's policies reads like a hit list of bad ideas. We can't say that we find John Kerry particularly exciting, but he performed like a thoroughbred last night, and the president was clearly unhappy to have his ass handed to him.

Perhaps, Mr. President, if you were capable of a spirited or emotionally-honest defense of your shameful little blood-war, you would be able to stand up in front of the country you are in charge of leading and explain it in such a way that even those of us who disagree with you would be forced to concede your good intentions. Since you are limited to your talking points in a way that we find not only frustrating but disgraceful, we will not hold our breath.

We won't bother to post any debate analysis until we see something clever. Until then, we will concentrate on getting our temper back under control.