The Guild 8-29-2003 Say Goodbye to Summer

"I can tell you my love for you will still be strong After the boys of summer have gone." -- Don Henley, "The Boys of Summer"

As Labor Day weekend approaches, the 2004 presidential campaign is taking shape. The days are getting shorter and the fortunes of some Democratic candidates who were hot in the spring may be beginning to fade. Some of the so-called top-tier Democratic candidates seeking to challenge Bush have failed to catch fire with voters in the important early primary states. Meanwhile, polls suggest that President Bush is vulnerable. News reports are for the first time portraying him as being on the defensive on foreign policy -- an issue that had been his strength.

Recent polls by Zogby International and Newsweek show that President Bush's job approval rating slipped over the summer, pegging him at just above 50 percent. At the same time, the public's anxiety over the administration's handling of Iraq -- from the number of soldiers being killed to the impact on the federal budget -- continues to rise.

The Zogby poll also points to another troubling sign for the president. Fewer people are saying the president deserves to be re-elected (45 percent) than are saying he does not deserve to be reelected (48 percent). That's a reversal from two and half months ago when the numbers lined up 49 percent to 38 percent in the president's favor. The numbers don't show a slippage among those who support the president as much as they show an increase in the number of people who don't. For those inclined to believe in the vast left-wing conspiracy, even a recent Fox News/Opinion Dynamic poll put the president's "deserves to be reelected" number at 47 percent.

"The president's poll numbers are a reflection of some other numbers: three million jobs lost, a deficit of a half a trillion dollars in one year," said Democratic National Committee spokesman Tony Welch. "And even some Republicans are saying the president has led us into disaster in Iraq. No matter what they say, the polls are an indication and reflection of something real."

Months ago, Bush pollster Matthew Dowd attempted to pre-empt "the sky-is-falling" scenarios. Dowd's analysis included some historical perspective: In 1983, President Reagan trailed possible opponents John Glenn and Walter Mondale in various polls. Reagan went on to beat Mondale in a landslide, winning 49 states. In 1987, President Bush trailed in generic ballot polls, but went on to handily defeat Michael Dukakis the next year. In late 1995 and early 1996, Wall Street Journal and Gallup polls had Bob Dole with a slight lead over Bill Clinton, who went on to defeat Dole in the November election.

It would be ridiculous to predict Bush's demise a year before the votes are cast. But polls do give a reliable snapshot in time of current opinions. That snapshots suggest the president is not as invincible as he once seemed.

For however much Bush's poll numbers may be lagging, he still compares favorably when stacked up against any of the Democrats, according to recent polls. Some of the so-called top-tier Democrats appear to be fading. Sens. John Edwards (N.C.) and Bob Graham (Fla.) are polling at about 2 percent in New Hampshire -- one point ahead of retired Gen. Wesley Clark, who hasn't announced his intentions, formed an organization, or raised one cent for a campaign. Is it too early to panic? Or should these two big names be thinking about returning their attention to their day jobs in the Senate? Those questions will be asked with ever-greater frequency after Labor Day.

There's no question what the Orlando Sentinel thinks Graham should do. It ran an editorial last week with the headline "Bow Out Bob Graham." Noting that Graham was running neck-and-neck with the Rev. Al Sharpton in Iowa, the paper suggested that "the longer [Graham] continues his long-shot bid for president, the more he risks diminishing his effectiveness as a senator."

The situation in North Carolina is even more interesting, given the competitiveness of the seat even if Edwards decides to stay in the Senate race. Some in the state's Democratic establishment have asked Edwards to declare his intentions by Labor Day. That's not going to happen. George Stephanopoulos reported on Sunday that Edwards aides had predicted in private conversations with him that their candidate would pull out of the Senate race by Sept. 16, the date set for his official presidential announcement. But that may not happen either.

Edwards is cognizant of his problem in the polls, but he and those around him believe it is a problem of name recognition rather than message. They still believe he is the most capable of the Democratic candidates. Campaign aides believe it's going to be between six and eight weeks before they'll see the results of Edwards's campaign ads and "Real Solutions Express" bus tour.

Sen. John Kerry (Mass.) doesn't have to worry about running for reelection because his Senate term doesn't end until 2009. But he does have to worry about slipping poll numbers in New Hampshire. One theory about the reason Kerry plans to make his official entry into the presidential race in front of the USS Yorktown aircraft carrier in Charleston, S.C., is that with former Vermont governor Howard Dean moving ahead in New Hampshire, Kerry is looking to broaden his horizons in the key southern state. Someone from a rival campaign referred to the Kerry announcement as a "gimmickry."

Asked to respond, Kerry spokesman Robert Gibbs quipped: "What criticism? Oh, you mean like going to South Carolina? This just in: there's a primary on Feb. 3! Yes folks, we have adjusted strategy and we will compete in South Carolina." Gibbs also notes that Dean was the only one of the "major" candidates to already be running hundreds of thousands in television ads in New Hampshire and Iowa. (When reminded that Edwards was also running ads, Gibbs chose not to amend his comments.)

The approach of Labor Day also brings nearer the decision by former Gen. Wesley Clark about whether he will run. But as I said in my live discussion last week, Clark's candidacy is looking less and less likely to become a reality. Despite the passion he engenders among some people, he's still largely unknown to the vast majority of the American public. To suggest that a guy who's never run for anything can jump in and build the organization and name recognition, and raise the kind of money he would need to compete and win the nomination this late in the game seems a stretch.

Two other candidates are struggling to be competitive in key states by introducing some new "gimmickry" to their serious campaigns. Missouri Rep. Richard Gephardt, who is running second to Dean in Iowa polls, has just announced "The Great Gephardt Iowa Pie Challenge," in which he asks voters of the great first caucus state to help him find the tastiest pie in the land.

"Iowa has a long tradition of bringing great pies to our nation," a Gephardt statement reads. "From Stone's 'mile high pie' in Marshalltown to the apple pie at Cronk's Café in Denison, I've only begun to nibble away at the best of what Iowa has to offer - now I need your help in finding all of the great pies in this great state."

I'm not sure this blatant pandering to the sweet-tooth constituency furthers his ambition to be seen as the candidate with the biggest boldest ideas (see Gephardt health care plan), but, hey, it can't hurt.

Lieberman, who is polling in single digits in New Hampshire, announced this week its "See Joe's Car & Go See Nomar!" contest. Voters in New Hampshire who spot one of the campaign's "JoeMobiles" can become eligible for tickets drawing to go see Nomar Garciaparra and the Boston Red Sox by calling or e-mailing the campaign and saying, "I saw the car and love Nomar."

Yep, ole Wesley can not answer questions with the best of them....

Wesley Clark's Imaginary Friend

Does Wesley Clark have an imaginary friend? The retired NATO commander and possible Democratic presidential candidate has been muttering darkly for several months that opportunists in the White House seized September 11 as a pretext to take out Saddam Hussein. Clark maintains that he received a call at home the afternoon of September 11, 2001, urging him to say on CNN that the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were connected to Iraq. But Clark has now provided three versions of this story, and they don't add up.

Version One: On "Meet the Press" on June 15 of this year, Clark asserted that intelligence about the Iraqi threat had been hyped. "Hyped by whom?" asked moderator Tim Russert.

CLARK: "I think it was an effort to convince the American people to do something, and I think there was an immediate determination right after 9/11 that Saddam Hussein was one of the keys to winning the war on terror. Whether it was the need just to strike out or whether he was a linchpin in this, there was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001 starting immediately after 9/11 to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein."

RUSSERT: "By who? Who did that?"

CLARK: "Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11. I was on CNN, and I got a call at my home saying, 'You've got to say this is connected. This is state-sponsored terrorism. This has to be connected to Saddam Hussein.' I said, 'But--I'm willing to say it, but what's your evidence?' And I never got any evidence. And these were people who had--Middle East think tanks and people like this, and it was a lot of pressure to connect this and there were a lot of assumptions made. But I never personally saw the evidence and didn't talk to anybody who had the evidence to make that connection."

That was an astonishing accusation of corruption in the White House, and unsurprisingly it caught the eye of several astute observers. Sean Hannity followed up two weeks later on Fox's "Hannity and Colmes": Referring to the Russert transcript above, Hannity said of the call, "I think you owe it to the American people to tell us who."

Version Two: Clark replied, "It came from many different sources, Sean."

HANNITY: "Who? Who?"

CLARK : "And I personally got a call from a fellow in Canada who is part of a Middle Eastern think tank who gets inside intelligence information. He called me on 9/11."

HANNITY: "That's not the answer. Who in the White House?"

CLARK: "I'm not going to go into those sources."

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman also understood that Clark was playing with live political ammunition, and he wrote a July 15 column attacking the White House and headlined, "Pattern of Corruption."

"Gen. Wesley Clark says that he received calls on Sept. 11 from 'people around the White House' urging him to link that assault to Saddam Hussein," wrote Krugman.

Last week, rather belatedly, the New York Times published a July 18 letter from Clark purporting to "correct" the record.

Version Three: "I would like to correct any possible misunderstanding of my remarks on 'Meet the Press' quoted in Paul Krugman's July 15 column, about 'people around the White House' seeking to link Sept. 11 to Saddam Hussein," Clark wrote to the Times.

"I received a call from a Middle East think tank outside the country, asking me to link 9/11 to Saddam Hussein. No one from the White House asked me to link Saddam Hussein to Sept. 11. Subsequently, I learned that there was much discussion inside the administration in the days immediately after Sept. 11 trying to use 9/11 to go after Saddam Hussein.

"In other words, there were many people, inside and outside the government, who tried to link Saddam Hussein to Sept. 11."

In other words, and let's have a show of hands here: How many of you believe Gen. Clark really got that call?

If you read version three carefully, you will see that Clark has now exonerated the White House of his most serious accusation. Much as he wants to put a sinister spin on the matter, all Clark is saying is that the White House was more sensitive to the Iraqi threat after 9/11.

That leaves the question of the call. It's true that journalists protect sources all the time. But there are also times when a source deserves to be burned, and this is one of them. We're not talking about a normal journalist-source relationship here. We're talking about someone who urged the former supreme allied commander of NATO to go on national TV on 9/11 and assert a provocative untruth.

What conceivable reason can Clark have for protecting this joker? This is not someone he called for information. This is someone who called him--who wanted to use Clark--to plant a phony story. And why is this grossly irresponsible "fellow in Canada who is part of a Middle Eastern think tank" privy to "inside intelligence information"? You would think Clark has a positive duty to expose the man. But that assumes he exists. Link

"Line up" is the right terminology. That bunch of whackos, liars and misfits ought to be hearing numbers on their chests behind a one-way mirror, while the crime victim - the American public - identifies all of them as perps who are trying to destroy the nation's economy and security.

Oh yes, happy Labor Day, all. Hope you're having better picnic weather than we. At least we're not having a garage sale like x42's former defense secretary:

HIGH-living Clinton-era Secretary of Defense William Cohen and his wife, former broadcaster Janet Langhart Cohen, are celebrating Labor Day by putting about 120 pieces of decorative art and jewelry on the auction block at the Park Central Hotel. The merchandise left behind from the sale of their eight-bedroom, 5,405-square-foot mansion in the Washington suburb of McLean, Va., will be hawked alongside about a dozen dusty odds and ends from the estate of President John F. Kennedy, including a swimsuit worn by Jackie O, handwritten notes from Jack and some smoking accouterments, with the total value of the sale estimated at $4 million. "We've gotten rid of a few pieces of his, but the only thing that has caught people's eye so far was a big-screen TV," says the Park Galleries flack Brenda Miszk. (Page Six)

Or is that a two-way mirror? Hmmm, must watch more "Law and Order."

This is good - Grayout Davis is trying to acquire a personality at the last minute. Too little, too late?

As he crisscrosses California pursued by forces bent on his political ruin, Gov. Gray Davis is looking a lot more life-like than the Gov. Gray Davis who traipsed into this mess.

Sure, his hairdo is still tightly coiffed. And at a news conference here the other day, when an oversize gulp of water dribbled from his chin, he was probably too obsessive in patting himself dry. Still, something is very different about Mr. Davis these days as he campaigns against the Oct. 7 recall that could cut short his 30-year political career in his second term as governor. He is laughing at himself. He is offering words of contrition. He is admitting shortcomings. He is slapping people on the back and talking about his private life as he has not done since his early days in politics. ...

And they know that it is a Herculean struggle for him when he tries to appear more easygoing in public (in college, he even tried to go by the chummier name, Joe — he was born Joseph Graham Davis Jr. — but the experiment failed). "It's what politicians try to do, they try to cover their warts," said Mayor Jerry Brown of Oakland, who employed Mr. Davis as his chief of staff during his two terms as governor during the 1970's and early 1980's. "My father went on a diet. Other people try to get a few new suits." ....

During a town-hall-style meeting broadcast on television and radio in the San Francisco Bay Area this week, Mr. Davis acknowledged it was not necessarily easy breaking from his time-worn political persona, but even that confession came off uncharacteristically natural. Many in the audience chuckled with him as he described his predicament. ... NY Times

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