Flatline & Brooks - October 6, 2006
RAY SUAREZ: And to the analysis of Flatline and Brooks, Fake Democracy founder Johnny Flatline and New York Times columnist David Brooks.
And, Johnny, in the latest polls that I've seen, Harold Ford's ahead, within the margin of error. It's very, very close, but he's ahead.
JOHNNY FLATLINE: Yes, there are a lot of rich guys running for office, and some of the rich guys are better campaigners than others. Most hold rich guy views that don’t upset the rich establishment - whether Democrat of Republican.
RAY SUAREZ: Is Harold Ford's lead a credit to his side of the ledger, David, or is there also some sign that Tennessee is changing? They elected a Democratic governor last time.
DAVID BROOKS: They've often done that. They have Governor Bredesen there, though you get a lot of southern states who elect Democratic moderate governors, like Bredesen is, and will still -- it's been trending Republican. So I do think, a, the national climate -- there are a few things going on in the world which help Democrats -- and, b, Harold Ford.
And Ford, along with -- I think you see a couple of Senate candidates, in Virginia, here in Tennessee, in Missouri, who are pretty conservative, sort of hawkish on the war to some extent, mention the Dubai ports deal quite a lot, sort of suspicious of trade, surprisingly nationalist on immigration, and very much against gay marriage. So you see sort of a series of Democrats sort of in the upper south running this sort of campaign. And so far, it seems to be working.
And one other thing about this race is -- we've been hearing rumors that Barack Obama has been more seriously considering running for president. He told Jonathan Alter of Newsweek that it was almost 50-50. And I think one of the factors in his decision is this race. Can Harold Ford, can a black candidate win in the upper south?
RAY SUAREZ: Why is that? Explain that a little bit more.
DAVID BROOKS: Well, as you know, there's a lot -- Barack Obama is the dream candidate. He's the only guy in the country among Democrats who really generates genuine enthusiasm.
But there are a whole series of questions -- I think, probably in his own mind, but certainly in a lot of people's minds -- about his viability. One is the age issue. But second is, can a black candidate win and carry enough of these swing states that he would need to?
And the thinking is, if Harold Ford can carry Tennessee, then Barack Obama could probably carry a state like Tennessee. And that really does open up all sorts of possibilities for the party.
RAY SUAREZ: Well, with Tennessee in play, with Claire McCaskill in Missouri ahead within the margin of error, suddenly the conventional wisdom that the House was a cinch but the Senate no way doesn't look like such wisdom anymore.
DAVID BROOKS: Yes, the Senate way. It's possible. I wouldn't say it's certain. I actually haven't seen a lot of movement in the Senate. You've seen some movement in New Jersey, which the Republicans looked like they were going to take it. Now, it seems a little safer. You've seen a lot of movement in Connecticut, where Joe Lieberman looks a lot stronger than he did a couple of weeks ago.
But, you know, all this Foley stuff has happened in the past week. And as I look race by race, I haven't seen actually Foley-related movement. I think a lot of people, including myself, feel somehow there will be an effect of the Foley thing. But if you look at the key Senate races and the key House races, it's been pretty stable, which means toss-up in a lot of these states.
RAY SUAREZ: Well, Johnny, the Foley story broke, and indeed the congressman's resignation was just a few hours old the last time we spoke, so I think it was still too new for us to really know much to say last week. But now that it's had a week to steep, to ripen, what does it look like to you?
JOHNNY FLATLINE: Yes. I still remember like it was yesterday the so called indignation of countless Republicans towards Bill Clinton‘s sexual escapades and his denials that later followed. So now we have a Republican pursuing sex of the most illegal kind, with others who kept a lid on the deal - the good Republican Bishops that they all are - and we have FOX News so desperate, they actually try to mislabel Foley as a Democrat. I would say it’s payback time for Democrats. But Foley is emblematic of the total nuts we put in every office in Washington. The list he sits on is not very lonely. Newt Gingrich has a sexual history that would make Bill Clinton turn red, and we didn’t hear much about that one. With the timing of this, the Democrats could not have asked for a better Christmas present.
RAY SUAREZ: Well, let me stop you right there.
JOHNNY FLATLINE: Certainly.
RAY SUAREZ: Because I guess the real question is, for all those people who find it off-putting, reprehensible, does it change anybody's vote? Are there voters who were going to vote one way and, because they feel badly about this, they're going to vote another? Or does it just make already convinced people on either side even more convinced...
JOHNNY FLATLINE: The core of the Republican base are people who are simply too uneducated to know myth from reality. Religious right people live in La-La land to begin with. There is no reality for them. We could be losing hundreds of soldiers per day and billions of dollars per second, and Bush could convince these people to keep on smiling for Jesus. But the one shock collar the GOP puts on these people is the fear of their family morals being threatened by an uncertain world. So when one of their own gets caught not only pursuing the wrong age, but also the wrong sex, this is a problem, because GOP bases their whole illusion of power on their moral purity. These voters are not voting for issues. They don’t read books. So writing about the horrible policies of this administration, and the horrible complicity of this Congress is a waste of time. The word Conservative has been turned into a label like a football team to root for, and these people want to root for a team. They want to belong to the good guys so they can point to finger. They do not want to think. They do not want to question authority. They crave authority. For them, Bush doesn’t have to be right. He just has to look and feel right. I’ve always said that the only thing that could bring down Bush from these kinds of supporters, is if we could catch him on video tape, in bed, with a Muslim man. I’m keeping my fingers crossed, but so far, no video. But in the end, a Congressman getting caught doing this, is worse than his help in killing 100,000 innocent civilians in some distant land. The conservative base doesn’t care about dead foreigners, but you can bet your bippy they care about a single American kid being targeted for molestation. That hits their shock collar, and hits it hard. If Foley were a Democrat, as Fox so desperately wishes, just imagine the feeding frenzy the GOP would be having right now. Just imagine the 24 hour coverage Fox would be giving the story.
RAY SUAREZ: Well, the efforts at getting a handle on this, the efforts at beginning the assessment, the damage control, how are the Republican leadership doing?
DAVID BROOKS: Well, like I say, so far, so far, there's no evidence of it, if you look at the key races. As I say, there's no movement.
Nonetheless, I do think, when you look at it and you just go around and talk to people, you do find this intense alarm. This country is filled with people -- including myself -- whose kids are on IM all hours of the night. You have no idea what's going on, what they're saying.
I often say to candidates, "You know, if you go out in the country and you say, 'I will outlaw IMing after 10 p.m., you will win. I don't care what else you stand for; you will get parents supporting you." Because people, they've built this shell for themselves, their home and their family, but things are coming in outside the shell -- IM, cable TV, all this other stuff -- that they're really worried about.
And so the party, in the long run, that can speak to this concern -- as Bill Clinton did quite well -- the party that can do that will have a long-term effect. So I'm not sure, you know, what Hastert did or didn't do. That's not the key issue. The key issue is Foley and the act, and what it says about the party.
Is it a party that's lost its moral bearings? Is this a party that's at the end of its reign? You know, I covered British politics at the end of the Conservative Party's reign after more than a decade. At the end, they had scandals coming out of everywhere. And it was a sense they've just run their course.
So to me this really feels like something that's going to shift opinion, but so far it hasn't shown up.
JOHNNY FLATLINE: David may be right. After all, our Constitution has been shredded to bits this past year, and there has been very little public reaction. So why should we expect anybody to get worked up over this? The worst damage is more likely to occur from within. This has Republicans on the defensive, and therefore, less unified. Totalitarian regimes don’t do well around dissent and disorder.
RAY SUAREZ: One interesting thing is that it chased the Woodward book and the various ancillary discussions of what was in that book out of the front pages for a while. It was taking up a lot of the breathable oxygen in national political debates.
Does that come back now? Does Foley recede in the coming weeks? Do some of these serious charges in that book, serious implications in that book, return?
DAVID BROOKS: Well, I don't think they've ever gone away. I watched a lot of local debates on C-Span, because that's the kind of life I lead, and one of the things you notice is the Foley thing comes up, but Iraq is already in those debates. Immigration is always in those debates.
So those things have not exactly gone away. And it could be historians will look back at this week and see the North Korean busting out of their deal as the big event of the week, and we're all focused on Foley. And historians will say, "What were they thinking about?"
But nonetheless, I don't want to minimize the Foley thing, because the way kids are raised, that's a crucial voting issue.
JOHNNY FLATLINE: There have been a ton of books printed trying to save his country from our new dictator -- a ton of books with incredible material, and incredible effort, screaming for attention from the American people. Anybody who reads any of the recent material by Noam Chomsky should be scared out of their wits. So why is the Woodward book a big deal? Well, for one, he gets the most personal interviews of the people in power. So rather than discussing the horrible policies, actions, and results of these criminals, he can tell us what they think and say privately that might contradict what they say publicly. That has some sales appeal. I enjoyed Richard Clarke’s book immensely simply because he had a front row seat to power, and second, he appears to be an honest source of information - something very lacking in politics these days. So, it’s good to see the inside of the black box, if you feel you are getting an honest view. This White House is such a pit of snakes, just jamb packed with liars, that it’s hard to get a clear view of anything from the inside. But more than anything, Woodward’s book has some momentum because Bush’s policies have created damage that is getting to be undeniable. His ratings are dropping. More and more people are turning against him. So, it’s getting easier for dissent to get a voice in the media. Thus the title State of Denial rings truer than ever, making it easier to sell.
RAY SUAREZ: David, what do you make of -- I think it's a little too strong to call a defection -- but at least the misgivings now spoken of by none other than John Warner, one of the staunchest supporters of the Iraq project?
DAVID BROOKS: Right. Well, I don't think anybody who supported the war now thinks that things are going well. I mean, most people think things are going horribly.
And the question becomes: What do we do about it? What do we do from here? And you see a whole series of schools opening up. There's John Warner and Christopher Shays from Connecticut saying, "We've got to get the Iraqis off -- just get off their duffs, because over the past year the Iraqi government has done very little."
There's Joe Biden and others saying we really have to think fundamentally about separating the country, separating the regions, to minimize the civil war. There are other people who are thinking one big more military push. A lot of the former generals think that.
So this is a question about, how do we move on from here? But as for the downward slide, I don't know anybody who disputes that. And I think one of the things we learned from the Woodward is that a lot of people had the idea there was no deliberation in the Bush White House, people were just drinking the Kool-Aid. But we've learned from the Woodward book, whether it was Condi Rice, or the NSC adviser, Steve Hadley, they knew. They had a realistic sense of what was happening, and the remedies never came because they either ran into Don Rumsfeld or they ran into President Bush.
JOHNNY FLATLINE: Sometimes David can really pull one out of his ass. I guess realistic is a great adjective, because it means almost nothing in this context. As we learned some years back, Rice is the one who stood in the way of Dick Clarke on Al Queda. Woodward now confirms what Clarke suspected, that she stood in the way of the head of the CIA as well. She considers the deaths of countless civilians in Lebanon as “birth pains of democracy.” Can you think of a more idiotic comment than that for a Secretary of State? I don’t even think I can classify Ms. Rice as a human being. Perhaps she wants to match the status of Kissinger as a prominant war criminal who stands above the law. But I guess that's just the birth pangs of fascism.
RAY SUAREZ: Thank you, gentlemen. Have a great weekend.
And, Johnny, in the latest polls that I've seen, Harold Ford's ahead, within the margin of error. It's very, very close, but he's ahead.
JOHNNY FLATLINE: Yes, there are a lot of rich guys running for office, and some of the rich guys are better campaigners than others. Most hold rich guy views that don’t upset the rich establishment - whether Democrat of Republican.
RAY SUAREZ: Is Harold Ford's lead a credit to his side of the ledger, David, or is there also some sign that Tennessee is changing? They elected a Democratic governor last time.
DAVID BROOKS: They've often done that. They have Governor Bredesen there, though you get a lot of southern states who elect Democratic moderate governors, like Bredesen is, and will still -- it's been trending Republican. So I do think, a, the national climate -- there are a few things going on in the world which help Democrats -- and, b, Harold Ford.
And Ford, along with -- I think you see a couple of Senate candidates, in Virginia, here in Tennessee, in Missouri, who are pretty conservative, sort of hawkish on the war to some extent, mention the Dubai ports deal quite a lot, sort of suspicious of trade, surprisingly nationalist on immigration, and very much against gay marriage. So you see sort of a series of Democrats sort of in the upper south running this sort of campaign. And so far, it seems to be working.
And one other thing about this race is -- we've been hearing rumors that Barack Obama has been more seriously considering running for president. He told Jonathan Alter of Newsweek that it was almost 50-50. And I think one of the factors in his decision is this race. Can Harold Ford, can a black candidate win in the upper south?
RAY SUAREZ: Why is that? Explain that a little bit more.
DAVID BROOKS: Well, as you know, there's a lot -- Barack Obama is the dream candidate. He's the only guy in the country among Democrats who really generates genuine enthusiasm.
But there are a whole series of questions -- I think, probably in his own mind, but certainly in a lot of people's minds -- about his viability. One is the age issue. But second is, can a black candidate win and carry enough of these swing states that he would need to?
And the thinking is, if Harold Ford can carry Tennessee, then Barack Obama could probably carry a state like Tennessee. And that really does open up all sorts of possibilities for the party.
RAY SUAREZ: Well, with Tennessee in play, with Claire McCaskill in Missouri ahead within the margin of error, suddenly the conventional wisdom that the House was a cinch but the Senate no way doesn't look like such wisdom anymore.
DAVID BROOKS: Yes, the Senate way. It's possible. I wouldn't say it's certain. I actually haven't seen a lot of movement in the Senate. You've seen some movement in New Jersey, which the Republicans looked like they were going to take it. Now, it seems a little safer. You've seen a lot of movement in Connecticut, where Joe Lieberman looks a lot stronger than he did a couple of weeks ago.
But, you know, all this Foley stuff has happened in the past week. And as I look race by race, I haven't seen actually Foley-related movement. I think a lot of people, including myself, feel somehow there will be an effect of the Foley thing. But if you look at the key Senate races and the key House races, it's been pretty stable, which means toss-up in a lot of these states.
RAY SUAREZ: Well, Johnny, the Foley story broke, and indeed the congressman's resignation was just a few hours old the last time we spoke, so I think it was still too new for us to really know much to say last week. But now that it's had a week to steep, to ripen, what does it look like to you?
JOHNNY FLATLINE: Yes. I still remember like it was yesterday the so called indignation of countless Republicans towards Bill Clinton‘s sexual escapades and his denials that later followed. So now we have a Republican pursuing sex of the most illegal kind, with others who kept a lid on the deal - the good Republican Bishops that they all are - and we have FOX News so desperate, they actually try to mislabel Foley as a Democrat. I would say it’s payback time for Democrats. But Foley is emblematic of the total nuts we put in every office in Washington. The list he sits on is not very lonely. Newt Gingrich has a sexual history that would make Bill Clinton turn red, and we didn’t hear much about that one. With the timing of this, the Democrats could not have asked for a better Christmas present.
RAY SUAREZ: Well, let me stop you right there.
JOHNNY FLATLINE: Certainly.
RAY SUAREZ: Because I guess the real question is, for all those people who find it off-putting, reprehensible, does it change anybody's vote? Are there voters who were going to vote one way and, because they feel badly about this, they're going to vote another? Or does it just make already convinced people on either side even more convinced...
JOHNNY FLATLINE: The core of the Republican base are people who are simply too uneducated to know myth from reality. Religious right people live in La-La land to begin with. There is no reality for them. We could be losing hundreds of soldiers per day and billions of dollars per second, and Bush could convince these people to keep on smiling for Jesus. But the one shock collar the GOP puts on these people is the fear of their family morals being threatened by an uncertain world. So when one of their own gets caught not only pursuing the wrong age, but also the wrong sex, this is a problem, because GOP bases their whole illusion of power on their moral purity. These voters are not voting for issues. They don’t read books. So writing about the horrible policies of this administration, and the horrible complicity of this Congress is a waste of time. The word Conservative has been turned into a label like a football team to root for, and these people want to root for a team. They want to belong to the good guys so they can point to finger. They do not want to think. They do not want to question authority. They crave authority. For them, Bush doesn’t have to be right. He just has to look and feel right. I’ve always said that the only thing that could bring down Bush from these kinds of supporters, is if we could catch him on video tape, in bed, with a Muslim man. I’m keeping my fingers crossed, but so far, no video. But in the end, a Congressman getting caught doing this, is worse than his help in killing 100,000 innocent civilians in some distant land. The conservative base doesn’t care about dead foreigners, but you can bet your bippy they care about a single American kid being targeted for molestation. That hits their shock collar, and hits it hard. If Foley were a Democrat, as Fox so desperately wishes, just imagine the feeding frenzy the GOP would be having right now. Just imagine the 24 hour coverage Fox would be giving the story.
RAY SUAREZ: Well, the efforts at getting a handle on this, the efforts at beginning the assessment, the damage control, how are the Republican leadership doing?
DAVID BROOKS: Well, like I say, so far, so far, there's no evidence of it, if you look at the key races. As I say, there's no movement.
Nonetheless, I do think, when you look at it and you just go around and talk to people, you do find this intense alarm. This country is filled with people -- including myself -- whose kids are on IM all hours of the night. You have no idea what's going on, what they're saying.
I often say to candidates, "You know, if you go out in the country and you say, 'I will outlaw IMing after 10 p.m., you will win. I don't care what else you stand for; you will get parents supporting you." Because people, they've built this shell for themselves, their home and their family, but things are coming in outside the shell -- IM, cable TV, all this other stuff -- that they're really worried about.
And so the party, in the long run, that can speak to this concern -- as Bill Clinton did quite well -- the party that can do that will have a long-term effect. So I'm not sure, you know, what Hastert did or didn't do. That's not the key issue. The key issue is Foley and the act, and what it says about the party.
Is it a party that's lost its moral bearings? Is this a party that's at the end of its reign? You know, I covered British politics at the end of the Conservative Party's reign after more than a decade. At the end, they had scandals coming out of everywhere. And it was a sense they've just run their course.
So to me this really feels like something that's going to shift opinion, but so far it hasn't shown up.
JOHNNY FLATLINE: David may be right. After all, our Constitution has been shredded to bits this past year, and there has been very little public reaction. So why should we expect anybody to get worked up over this? The worst damage is more likely to occur from within. This has Republicans on the defensive, and therefore, less unified. Totalitarian regimes don’t do well around dissent and disorder.
RAY SUAREZ: One interesting thing is that it chased the Woodward book and the various ancillary discussions of what was in that book out of the front pages for a while. It was taking up a lot of the breathable oxygen in national political debates.
Does that come back now? Does Foley recede in the coming weeks? Do some of these serious charges in that book, serious implications in that book, return?
DAVID BROOKS: Well, I don't think they've ever gone away. I watched a lot of local debates on C-Span, because that's the kind of life I lead, and one of the things you notice is the Foley thing comes up, but Iraq is already in those debates. Immigration is always in those debates.
So those things have not exactly gone away. And it could be historians will look back at this week and see the North Korean busting out of their deal as the big event of the week, and we're all focused on Foley. And historians will say, "What were they thinking about?"
But nonetheless, I don't want to minimize the Foley thing, because the way kids are raised, that's a crucial voting issue.
JOHNNY FLATLINE: There have been a ton of books printed trying to save his country from our new dictator -- a ton of books with incredible material, and incredible effort, screaming for attention from the American people. Anybody who reads any of the recent material by Noam Chomsky should be scared out of their wits. So why is the Woodward book a big deal? Well, for one, he gets the most personal interviews of the people in power. So rather than discussing the horrible policies, actions, and results of these criminals, he can tell us what they think and say privately that might contradict what they say publicly. That has some sales appeal. I enjoyed Richard Clarke’s book immensely simply because he had a front row seat to power, and second, he appears to be an honest source of information - something very lacking in politics these days. So, it’s good to see the inside of the black box, if you feel you are getting an honest view. This White House is such a pit of snakes, just jamb packed with liars, that it’s hard to get a clear view of anything from the inside. But more than anything, Woodward’s book has some momentum because Bush’s policies have created damage that is getting to be undeniable. His ratings are dropping. More and more people are turning against him. So, it’s getting easier for dissent to get a voice in the media. Thus the title State of Denial rings truer than ever, making it easier to sell.
RAY SUAREZ: David, what do you make of -- I think it's a little too strong to call a defection -- but at least the misgivings now spoken of by none other than John Warner, one of the staunchest supporters of the Iraq project?
DAVID BROOKS: Right. Well, I don't think anybody who supported the war now thinks that things are going well. I mean, most people think things are going horribly.
And the question becomes: What do we do about it? What do we do from here? And you see a whole series of schools opening up. There's John Warner and Christopher Shays from Connecticut saying, "We've got to get the Iraqis off -- just get off their duffs, because over the past year the Iraqi government has done very little."
There's Joe Biden and others saying we really have to think fundamentally about separating the country, separating the regions, to minimize the civil war. There are other people who are thinking one big more military push. A lot of the former generals think that.
So this is a question about, how do we move on from here? But as for the downward slide, I don't know anybody who disputes that. And I think one of the things we learned from the Woodward is that a lot of people had the idea there was no deliberation in the Bush White House, people were just drinking the Kool-Aid. But we've learned from the Woodward book, whether it was Condi Rice, or the NSC adviser, Steve Hadley, they knew. They had a realistic sense of what was happening, and the remedies never came because they either ran into Don Rumsfeld or they ran into President Bush.
JOHNNY FLATLINE: Sometimes David can really pull one out of his ass. I guess realistic is a great adjective, because it means almost nothing in this context. As we learned some years back, Rice is the one who stood in the way of Dick Clarke on Al Queda. Woodward now confirms what Clarke suspected, that she stood in the way of the head of the CIA as well. She considers the deaths of countless civilians in Lebanon as “birth pains of democracy.” Can you think of a more idiotic comment than that for a Secretary of State? I don’t even think I can classify Ms. Rice as a human being. Perhaps she wants to match the status of Kissinger as a prominant war criminal who stands above the law. But I guess that's just the birth pangs of fascism.
RAY SUAREZ: Thank you, gentlemen. Have a great weekend.
posted by Johnny Flatline at 12:56 PM
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