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election 2004
Why 2020 Is Starting to Feel Like 2004
Sixteen years ago, leading Democrats shied away from doing the right thing. Today, they're perilously close to making the same mistake
Jun 03, 2019
On March 15, 2003, Governor Howard Dean of Vermont, at the time a decidedly second-tier presidential candidate, took the stage at the convention of the California Democratic Party. The first thing he said, to a thunderous cheer, was this: "What I want to know is what in the world so many Democrats are doing supporting the president's unilateral intervention in Iraq." He then ran through a litany of his party's failures to stand up to George W. Bush and the GOP, and finished with a rhetorical flourish that instantly made him a serious contender: "I'm Howard Dean, and I'm here to represent the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party."
While Dean didn't win the nomination, his candidacy shone a bright light on the way Democrats had become timid and fearful, always worrying that if they were too clear in their criticism of the war or the administration that the public would reject them. More important, he showed how disgusted so many in the rank-and-file were with the way their representatives had been acting, and what a hunger there was for a more forceful brand of opposition.
Back then it was Iraq, and today it's the potential impeachment of Donald Trump.
Sixteen years later, the situation is not precisely the same, but it has some important parallels. That same fear--that if Democrats make their beliefs fully known or act too forcefully in opposing a Republican president, then the public will react against them--survives, even if it doesn't dominate the party's upper reaches the way it did in 2003. As they were back then, they are desperate to unseat the president, but divided on how best to do it. And on the question that dominates their internal debates, they seem to be concerned mostly with whether it's too politically risky to do the right thing. Back then it was Iraq, and today it's the potential impeachment of Donald Trump.
Perhaps I'm not being entirely fair to those many Democrats who voted to authorize the war in the fall of 2002. Some may have sincerely believed that it was a good idea. But coming a little over a year after September 11--and amid a constant barrage of Republican assaults on their patriotism--the fear of looking insufficiently "tough" dominated their thinking as they considered authorizing the use of force.
And it wasn't hard to see that the Bush administration was carrying out an enormously deceptive propaganda campaign to convince the public that if we didn't invade Iraq, at any moment they'd attack us with their fearsome arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. When Dick Cheney said, "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us," there was no doubt he was lying, along with the rest of the administration.
But ambitious Democrats were certain that opposing war would be politically disastrous. So among those who voted to give the invasion the green light were future presidential candidates John Kerry, John Edwards, Dick Gephardt, Joe Lieberman, Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton. History has not been kind to them on that score.
At the time, though, they justified their vote by arguing that the threat from Saddam was indeed a terrifying one. In stark contrast, it's almost impossible today to find a Democrat who doesn't agree on substantive grounds that Donald Trump deserves to be impeached. Many thought so even before Robert Mueller released the report detailing his findings, but the rest certainly do now, after Mueller laid out not only how Trump sought and welcomed help from the Russian government to win the 2016 election but the repeated attempts he made to obstruct the investigation.
And Trump adds to the grounds for impeachment on a near-daily basis. When the House Judiciary Committee approved articles of impeachment for Richard Nixon in July 1974, one of the articles cited the fact that he had "failed without lawful cause or excuse to produce papers and things as directed by duly authorized subpoenas" issued by Congress. Trump has not only done that multiple times, he has declared that he will simply refuse to comply with any and all congressional investigations of him and his administration.
There are no Democrats saying his actions don't warrant impeachment. The ones who oppose it, or at least oppose it for now, argue that it would be politically disadvantageous for Democrats. You might or might not find their arguments persuasive (I don't, though I'm willing to grant that no one knows for sure), but it's hard to imagine that when the history of the Trump era is written, declining to impeach him will look like some kind of profile in courage. As I've argued before, the simplest moral calculus says that if Donald Trump deserves to be impeached, then Donald Trump should be impeached.
The latest California party convention happened this past weekend, and there was no one who broke out with the kind of striking criticism of their party that Howard Dean managed in 2003. That's because there are already plenty of Democrats running for president who are not only ready to impeach Trump but are also advocating sweeping policy change. "When I lead the Democratic Party, we will not be a party that nibbles around the edges," said Elizabeth Warren. "Our Democratic Party will be a party of bold, structural change." In a similar vein, Pete Buttigieg said of President Trump, "He wins if we look like more of the same. Which means, surprisingly, that the riskiest thing we could do is try to play it safe."
There was a figure they and others were not-too-subtly referencing: Joe Biden, who not only advocates a more moderate set of policy solutions but recently said that when Trump is out of the White House, "You will see an epiphany occur among many of my Republican friends," and they'll be ready for bipartisan governing. Biden's friend Mitch McConnell no doubt had a good laugh at that one.
While Biden is leading the polls at the moment, you can bet that his circa-2002 approach to the Trump presidency will become an issue as the primary race goes on. The question is whether the party is fundamentally different now than it was then, and whether they're looking for something else in their next leader.
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Your Worst Fears About Fox News Are Confirmed By New Study
Everyone knows the news outlet serves as a virtual propaganda tool, but new research shows just how effective they are at it
Sep 08, 2017
Fox News Channel has been recognized since its inception in 1996, when it was established by Republican operative Roger Ailes, as a right-leaning news source. But a new study published in the American Economic Review shows just how influential the channel is when it comes to changing viewers' minds, causing them to shift to the right on political issues--and even influencing election outcomes in ways that the outlet's more liberal counterparts don't.
Researchers at Emory and Stanford universities found that watching only three minutes of Fox News coverage per week would make Democratic and centrist voters one percent more likely to vote Republican in the 2008 election.
According to the study, this means that if Fox News hadn't existed in 2004, George W. Bush would have captured nearly four fewer percentage points, making John Kerry the popular vote winner. In 2008, Barack Obama would have won in a landslide if it weren't for Fox, capturing 60 percent of the vote, with John McCain winning 6.34 percent fewer votes.
Notably, the research shows that Fox appears driven by its ability to shift its viewership to the right even more than it's guided by its bottom line. According toVox, the study finds "that Fox isn't setting its ideology where it ought to, to maximize its viewership. It's much more conservative than is optimal from that perspective. But it's pretty close to the slant that would maximize its persuasive power--that would result in the largest rightward movement among viewers. CNN, by contrast, matched its political stances pretty closely to the viewer-maximizing point, showing less interest in operating as a political agent."
CNN and MSNBC are also not as effective at shaping viewers' opinions. "Fox is substantially better at influencing Democrats than MSNBC is at influencing Republicans," said the authors of the study. While Fox was able to convince 58 percent of Democratic viewers to vote for Bush in 2000, and persuaded sizable minorities of Democrats to vote Republican in the following two elections, MSNBC did not have the same effect on conservative viewers in the same elections.
Fox News Channel "is consistently more effective at converting viewers than is MSNBC which has corresponding estimated persuasion rates of just 16 percent, 0 percent, and 8 percent," said the study.
The study confirms earlier research done after Fox was introduced in 1996, including a 2007 report from Berkeley which found "a significant effect of the introduction of Fox News on the vote share in Presidential elections between 1996 and 2000...Fox News convinced 3 to 28 percent of its viewers to vote Republican."
The newest research confirms what many critics already suspected about Fox News: that it's pushed conservative ideals and Republican agendas since its beginning, serving as a tool used by the GOP establishment to shift viewers to the right--and even swing elections.
The study did not analyze Fox's impact on the 2016 election, but according to a Pew Research poll taken in January, Fox News was the most-watched news source among Trump voters during the campaign, with 40 percent of his supporters relying on the channel for their news.
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U.S. Health Care Is Bad For Your Health
Jun 03, 2007
One of the most contentious issues of the U.S. presidential campaign will be how to fix what many agree is a malfunctional health-care system. Adding fuel to the fire is a study published last month detailing the shortcomings of U.S. health care when compared to the systems of other developed countries, including Canada, the United Kingdom and New Zealand.
The study, entitled "Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: An International Update on the Comparative Performance of American Health Care," released by the Commonwealth Fund in New York, finds that not only is the U.S. health care system the most expensive in the world (double that of the next most costly comparator country, Canada) but comes in dead last in almost any measure of performance.
Although U.S. political leaders are fond of stating that we have the best health-care system in the world, they fail to acknowledge an important caveat: It is the best only for the very rich. For the rest of the population, its deficits far outweigh its advantages.
For the Republican presidential candidates, health care hasn't become a major issue -- yet. The three leading Democratic candidates, however, are outspoken critics of the health-care system and argue for the need to increase coverage to most, if not all, Americans.
This new study not only confirms the findings of previous Commonwealth Fund studies, but also a previous analysis by the World Health Organization in 2000 that found the overall performance of the U.S. health-care system ranked 37th among the countries included in the analysis.
The Commonwealth study compared the United States with Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. Although the most notable way in which the United States differs from the other countries is in the absence of universal coverage, the United States is also last on dimensions of access, patient safety, efficiency and equity.
The other five countries considered spend considerably less on health care, both per capita and as a percent of gross domestic product, than the United States. The United States spends $7,000 per person per year on health care, almost double that of Australia, Canada and Germany, each of which achieve better results on health status indicators than the United States. This suggests that the U.S. health-care system can and must do much more with its substantial investment in health.
The United States also lags behind all industrialized nations in terms of health coverage. The most recent data available from the U.S. Census Bureau indicate that 46.6 million Americans (about 15.9 percent of the population) had no health insurance coverage during 2005, an increase of 1.3 million over the previous year. It is no wonder, then, that medical bills are overwhelmingly the most common reason for personal bankruptcy in the United States.
According to the Children's Health Fund, 9 million children are completely uninsured in the United States, while another 23.7 million - nearly 30 percent of the nation's children -- lack regular access to health care.
Compared to the other countries studied, the United States lags behind in the adoption of information technology and other national policies that promote quality improvement. Up-to-date information systems in countries such as New Zealand, Germany and the United Kingdom enhance physicians' ability to monitor chronic conditions and medication use, including medications prescribed by other physicians. In other countries, experienced nurses are working to monitor chronic conditions, thus easing the physicians' burden.
The United States also ranks last among the countries studied, both in terms of efficiency and equity. The United States has poor performance on national health expenditures and administrative costs. In terms of equity, Americans with below-average income were more reluctant to visit a physician when sick, and more often did not get a recommended test, fill a prescription or undergo a needed treatment or seek a proper follow-up on a condition.
Only a thorough reform can solve the U.S. health care system's deep structural problems. It is imperative that everyone is adequately insured and has the possibility to afford good care. At the same time, the United States must make sure to incorporate the advantages of modern health information technology and to ensure an integrated medical record and information system.
Lessons from other countries' experiences could be applied and adapted to the U.S. situation. In a recent article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel, from the Department of Clinical Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health stated, "The U.S. health-care system is considered a dysfunctional mess." Given the seriousness of the situation, this is an understatement.
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