Republicans & Conservatives Archives

Takes a lot of effort to spin reality, doesn’t it?

Fact is, Kerry and Bush will be in a dead heat to the finish line, regardless of how much negative spin the RNC, pundits, and Rove throw up with their final 250 million dollar war chest.

The nation is split, the independents find things to like and hate in both candidates. If I were betting however, my money would be on Kerry. The issues will become ever more important as we get closer to November, and on those issues, Bush has little to defend his record with, less than Kerry will have.

News Flash: Politicans say things, then do the opposite.

News Flash: President Bush is just as guilty as Senator Kerry of doing so.

I see Mark, you failed to mention John McCain’s statement that Kerry is not soft on defense. He went on to say, how unfortunate ‘some people’ will go to great lengths to distort voting records like his friend from Massachusetts.

Play that quip in a commercial in a number of swing states, and watch the polls move among Independents.

I would like to see you put as much effort into explaining how the Bush tax cuts are creating jobs.

You don’t have to “spin” anything to show that Bush’s tax cuts are creating jobs. You just have to cut through Democratic spin (and let’s start calling them “Bush and Kerry’s tax cuts, please, since Kerry voted for them too.)

The current unemployment rate is 5.6. At this point of Clinton’s first term it was 5.5—virtually identical. And Clinton was reelected on the strength of what was percieved as a strong economy (with economic indicators, with the exception of job growth, not even close to Bush’s numbers). For a little perpective, remember that France’s unemployment rate is 9.1 and Germany’s is around 10.

It’s common knowledge that job growth is the last indicator to improve even during a boom.
The reason the only thing Democrats and their media allies can talk about right now is jobs is that that is the only thing they have to run on.

Unfortunately for Kerry, there are not millions of displaced Okies and laid-off factory workers wandering the dustbowls of America right now in search of a voting booth where they can vote for John Kerry. The unemployment number is 5.6%, and in a just world this would match his percentage of the vote.

Mark, there are about seven months between now and election day. The best you’ve been able to do is jump on things he’s said, and changed positions on certain issues. That may be enough to take the glamour off of Kerry, But will it make them like Bush?

Bush has one major liability: He has committed some rather big errors.

Reference the whole Iraq thing. He can talk about freeing Iraq til he’s blue in the face, but the fact is, that wasn’t his pretext. Regime change was going to be a side initiative to defeating terrorists, remember?

He’s stonewalling an investigation he has no need to stonewall, not if he’s blameless. The medicare issue will likely initiate a number of investigations. His tax cuts are obviously piling on the debt, only defering the costs to the taxpayers, not giving them any real savings.

Bush’s administration has problem it can’t redefine itself out of. Whether it survives this election will be a matter of luck.

Martin, the problem with the unemployment figures is that they do not figure in those who are no longer looking for work.

Additionally, if you look at the real jobless numbers, you will find that Bush is still missing millions of jobs that we had, previous to his administration. Bush has not even satisfied his own projections for jobs created, much less anybody else’s hopes for that.

Apparently Bush, Rove, and Co don’t believe that there is going to be an implosion, because they are already “going negative” eight months before the election. If they thought Kerry was cooked, they would let Bush stay above the fray at look like a statesmen. Every time you see Bush take a potshot at Kerry, that is just more evidence that they are worried.

No, David, no spin; that was an educated observation. And my post was and almost totally non-partisan explanation.

This “nation is split down the middle” bit is a convenient media saw, but, as I used to say in school, it doesn’t buy your beer. This nation is trending conservative, and the dynamics of the 2000 election do not exist in this one.

Now, John Kerry has the ABB crowd, the hardcore Dems and their fellow travellers. I’ll put that group at 43% as a pretty good guess. People who say they will definitely vote to reelect the President? You’re looking at 49 to 51-percent of the electorate.

What Kerry must do is to oust President Bush. To do that, he’s going to need something to recommend him to voters, and all he has now is that he is not George Bush. That plays fine to the 43%, but he has a lot of work to do. As I’ve said, I see him continuing to make things worse for himself. - m

Stephen…

You can be certain that the Democrats will call for plenty of investigations between now and election day.

Why did we go to Iraq? The Administration gave us three reasons: Saddam and WMD, Saddam and terrorists, and Saddam’s inhumanity, all three of which called for regime change. The reason for going into Iraq was to enforce the U.N. resolutions.

There are over seven months, Stephen, but the Dems have nothing fatal on the President. The President, as the incumbent, needs nothing like that on Kerry. America will not elect a bad candidate, and Kerry is a bad candidate.

Woody…

The President, Karl Rove, Ken Mehlman, et al. know better than to coast until the election. When you have a candidate like Kerry, constantly on the negative attack like he was during the Dem primaries, you see what happened to the President’s polls. While the President sat back and did nothing while Kerry screamed negative after negative, Kerry built up an actual lead in most polls.

This is going to be a two-way fight, as it should be. The Bush strategy seems to be focusing on Kerry’s negatives, and there are a lot of them. I don’t know what Kerry’s strategy is. I don’t think he’s yet made up his mind, and he might need Begala and Carville — Clinton’s boyz — to steer him otherwise. - m

The idea that that the drop in employment can be attrituted to people giving up their job searches probably does have some basis in fact, but it isn’t the whole story. Those who give up looking for work is always an unseen (and largely unknowable) factor in unemployment figures—now as it was under Clinton and every other president (although, as with any point you want to make, you can find antecdotal evidence to support it). You’re on shaky ground, however, when you try and score political points based on pure speculation and data-less theoretical models.

There are two other factors in play in the job numbers: downsized white collar workers returning to school (for which the numbers are up substantially), and a very large increase in the percentage of stay-at-home moms (many, I’ll concede, who might wish to go back to work when the job situation becomes more robust).

In any case, it’s true that there is a jobs-growth problem—but what’s the cause and what’s the solution?

The Democrats, so far, have niether a plausible explanation of the problem or a plausible solution—they talked about the horrors of “outsourcing” for a few weeks in an attempt to whip up the xenophobia of their protectionist union base, but then it was demonstrated (heroically, I thought, by liberal NYT columnist Tom Friedman that outsourcing creates more jobs than it loses). Basically, the Democrats—like everybody else—has no idea how to fix the problem. Fortunately the ecomomy will likely (as most independent observers agree) eventually fix the problem itself. Hopefully when this happens we won’t have yet another Democrat president taking credit for yet another Bush recovery (as Clinton did).

Mr. Kintner, Take a look at the polls Sixty percent of the country thinks we’re going in the wrong direction in the first poll. In the second, it’s 49 to 41 against.

Bush’s approval rating is at 48! Less than half! If that isn’t a country split down the middle, I don’t know how you define it.

I think you should be worried, in both the political and the popular sense of things, that your candidate went from a 70 percent approval rating after 9/11 to less than half. That is quite a ways to fall in the eyes of the public.

Of course, having seen a number of past Bush Sr. and Jr. campaigns, being a Texan, I’m under no illusions of the extent to which their staffs will go to get their people elected. This election will be challenging, but at least the Democrats have the facts on their side.

It’s miraculous, really, after months of totally unchallenged pounding from the Dems, that Bush’s positive rating is anywhere near 50%.

The bad for news fo Kerry, as long as we’re talking about polls, is really bad. In the new NYT/CBS poll, 29 percent give him an unfavorable rating, 28 percent favorable, and 43 percent had no impression of him at all! That means Kerry’s still an unknown quantity to a huge portion of voters, most of whom have already made up their minds about Bush (minimizing the actual potential to redefine Bush on the part of the Kerry campaign and the Soros-financed 527 propoganda machine). There’s a huge opening for the Bush campaign, however, to do just that to Kerry. And I think we’re already not only seeing this strategy in action, but some tangible results.

And Kerry seems all-too willing to make it easy during this all-so crucial first stage, what with his now much-repeated “I voted for it before I voted against it” quote, his use of vulgarity while publicly insulting secret service agents assigned to his protection, and his failure, so far, to switch from the red-meat rhetoric of the Democratic primary to making a postive appeal to the fluid middle.

Those who give up looking for work is always an unseen (and largely unknowable) factor in unemployment figures—now as it was under Clinton and every other president

Their existence is not ‘unknowable’, it’s a fact. The only question is whether the numbers are as bad as we think they are, or worse.

Under the Clinton administration, those people (quite a few of them, stay-at-home-Moms) were able to work because there was a shortage of labor. Retail stores were offering higher wages and benefits to seasonal help because there just weren’t enough people to fill all the job openings.

Talk averages and cherry-pick numbers all you want, but that’s not the economic climate that Republican rule has provided this great country.

American’s want to work and will work if there are jobs available. The Democrats know what the problem is and how to solve it.

The current economic climate does not instill the confidence to invest in new ventures and it certainly doesn’t make me want to put up my house as collateral for a business loan to start a company like I did in ‘97.

How do you start creating business and investment confidence? You do what Clinton and Rubin proved works: stop deficit spending.

>In the new NYT/CBS poll, 29 percent give him an unfavorable rating…

Would this be the same NYT/CBS poll in which Bush had a 39 percent unfavorable rating? It is true that people haven’t made their mind up about Kerry. I think it is quite a stretch to call that a bad thing.

>making a postive appeal to the fluid middle.

And what is Bush doing? Is “Vote for Kerry and he’ll surrender to the terrorists and let queers get married” a positive appeal?

Okay, let’s stop deficit spending. I’m all for it, and it is the biggest gripe even Bush supporters like me have against the administration. But please explain to me how that would create jobs in the short term any faster than they’re already being created? Also, how is the deficit even connected to the current job outlook? Anyone making this connection knows very little about how the economy works or is merely reading from a Kerry campaign script. In the long-term, if the economy fails to outgrow the deficit (which I for one am willing to concede) then the deficit could cut into job growth because businesses will have to assume a greater tax burden, inhibiting expansion.

And precisely which entitlement programs are the Democrats eager to cut? Shall we means-test Social Security (yes, please). Slash the defense budget? Medicare? Education? What is the precise Democratic proposal here—if they dare say with any specifity, then the election is over and Bush has won. It will also demonstrate how utterly unconnected to basic economic principles is current Democratic rhetoric. As it stands, the Democrats are just vaguely gesturing toward problems which have nothing to do with Bush’s policies—except insofar as Bush’s policies have already begun to demonstrably solve them.

The economy needs to be left alone to do what it’s already doing—growing quickly and slowly but surely starting too create jobs. The only reason to even suggest we interfere with this process is because John Kerry wants to be president and there’s no way to make the case without armchair quarterbacking and phony economics.

For some reason I feel like I have to take issue with this statement:

“…if you look at the real jobless numbers, you will find that Bush is still missing millions of jobs that we had, previous to his administration. Bush has not even satisfied his own projections for jobs created, much less anybody else’s hopes for that.”

Of the millions of those jobs how many of those were meaningless jobs at dot bombs that should have never been in business in the first place? I’m not asking that rhetorically, I’d actually like to see some numbers on this. It seems like a pointless argument to make when a great number of those jobs shouldn’t have existed to begin with.

Kerry will not implode. This is wishful thinking on your part.

What you do not realize is that, as Bush keeps attacking Kerry for changing his mind, Bush is changing his story. He has changed his story so many times with reference to Iraq and with reference to the economy, that people are calling him a liar.

People everywhere. In this country. In Europe. In the Arab world. In Asia.

In plain language, Bush, not Kerry, is imploding.

Bush was elected because he was considered to be a straight shooter. Now that it is obvious, even to conservatives in Congress (with passage of the Medicare bill through lies), that he is a liar, how is he going to sell himself?

Bush’s solution seems to be to try to destroy Kerry’s reputation. It will not work. Bush’s reputation will be destroyed further than it is today.

Martin, economics is not rocket science. It’s basic math applied on a grand scale.

The Democrat’s concept is simple, if we create confidence in the future economic growth of this country, then new businesses and jobs will emerge. The best start to start creating confidence is by stopping the deficit spending.

Clinton and Rubin were able to do that despite hostility by Republicans and even some Democrats in Congress. Kerry was one of the supporters of this policy.

You, yourself, admit deficit spending is a problem. What have you done about it? I’ve written letters to my representatives and voted for candidates who have a real plan for improving the economy. I will continue to do so by voting for Kerry.

Feel free to vote for a president who (like the Communists 20 years ago) is clinging to an economic ideology that has already proven to be a failure. I will do what I can to make this country as great as it can possibly be, rather than be satisfied with a sub-par economy.

The economy may be growing ‘slowly but surely’, but it could be growing ‘by leaps and bounds’.

But Lee, if we take steps right now to reign in the deficit—which we agree will have to be done eventually—what will that entail? It would have to be either significant tax hikes across the board or slashing entitlements.

Neither party, regretably, has the political will to slash entitlements just now—to touch that fabled “third rail” of politics. So what’s left? All that’s left is across the board tax-hikes which could have the effect of slowing growth, shrinking the tax-base and not only slowing job-growth but increasing lay-offs. This could effectively decrease the deficit over the short term, but it’s not going to help the job outlook (except, possibly in the VERY long term). No, it’s better right now to stay the course and let the economy create the jobs that it’s already started to. Better a slowly improving situation than dramatic actions that may take us in the opposite direction.

All that’s left is across the board tax-hikes which could have the effect of slowing growth, shrinking the tax-base and not only slowing job-growth but increasing lay-offs.

That’s funny Martin. Clinton’s Treasury Secretary, Robert Rubin, can answer that one better than I ever could:

“The decision the President made in this process [spending reductions coupled with a small tax hike] marked a dramatic change in fiscal policy. The opponents of that change - especially supply-side advocates who vehemently objected to including tax increases in our deficit reduction program - predicted that our program would lead to increased unemployment, higher deficits, and economic stagnation, recession, or worse. Republican Representative Dick Armey of Texas, chairman of the House Republican Conference, said the plan would be “a disaster for the performance of the economy” and warned that “no deficit reduction, no good can come of it.” His colleague from Texas, Republican Senator Phil Gramm, called it “a one way ticket to a recession.” Instead, the country had the longest period of growth in it’s history, massive new private-sector job creation, low inflation, higher incomes across all income groups, increased investment and productivity growth, and lower deficits, eventually followed by surpluses. That has been a great and enduring frustration to supply-side advocates, who first predicted that our policies would cause great economic injury and then, when the opposite happened, argued that sound fiscal policy had nothing to do with economic conditions they had predicted would not occur.”

“The unemployment number is 5.6%, and in a just world this would match his percentage of the vote”

so are you saying that as long as you have a job you should be happy with what and who you have?

‘Cause I have a job, and i ain’t happy with who we got!

can someone explain to me how corporate expansion is good when they decide to expand to india instead of indiana?

bush gives huge corporate tax cuts to spur businesses to downsize, thus boosting productivity, he’s trying to cut overtime pay for a huge amount of american’s, and still the companies are leaving the country…

did you know that there was a motion to reclassify food-service jobs (ie. flippin burgers at mcdonalds) as manufacturing jobs?

yeah…..that’s just great.

Ok, rob, I can answer that one as a (Clinton) Democrat.

Any time an American company expands and makes more money by reducing costs, profits increase. That means they pay more money in taxes (unless they’re incorporated outside the US, which is cheating and should and will be stopped when Kerry is elected) which (along with keeping government spending under control, which Bush can’t or won’t do as well as Clinton did) reduces deficit spending by the government.

A fiscally responsible government (which even the Republicans ere admit we don’t have right now) creates confidence in the economic future of this country which encourages the expansion and creation of businesses (and jobs) in the US.

Our current economic situation is analogous to the situation that Clinton and his Treasury Secretary, Robert Rubin, inherited: huge government debt and spending deficits, sluggish growth, and flat job creation. The economy can be made to boom exactly the same way it was last time. It’s not rocket science, it’s a matter of priorities.

‘Offshoring’ is not the problem. the problem is that the Bush administration is more interested in creating an economy that benefits their patrons rather than one that creates new jobs.

I am a little bewildered why the news media has not picked up on some very obvious slants on recent events in reference to Clarke.

1. Most people thought it was bad campaigning for Kerry to take a
vacation at this time, but I submit to you that it was very calculated and
coordinated with Richard Clarke and his recent claims. The Kerry campaign
decided it was better to be out of the public view in order to distance
himself from the Clarke rant.

2. Clarke had his own little empire reporting to the NSC and basically being
accountable to no one until February 2003, he headed a cyber-security office at
the White House until the office was transferred to the newly created
Homeland Security Department in February 2003. He announce his retirement
January 31 2003, before he would have been required to report to the Office
of Homeland Security, a department he thinks he should have been running or at least the number 2 man. It seems very obvious to me that Richard Clarke has an agenda, and selective
memory of past events, that stem primarily from his being ignored as a
possible candidate for Secretary of Homeland Security or the number 2 job.

Kerry’s biding his time, letting the Clarke issue play out. Were he to intervene, I have no doubt it would play to confirm the Bush assertion that the guy’s auditioning for Kerry’s camp. I think he’s going to wait long enough for it to become part of the conventional wisdom, and then start a drumbeat on it.

As for the second point, Mr. Pritzker, I would not call your point of view unbiased, since you seem so quick to slam Clarke. Any news organization that printed something like what you wrote would hardly look unbiased. It’s a talking point straight from the talk radio circuit.

If you want absolute numbers of the losses in American Jobs, Bush, in a way can tell you himself: it’s at the the department of labor site: a large number, to be sure.

As for jobs, I’d say they should be a big concern for the businesses out there. Adam Smith would say that between luxuries and jobs, the economy grows better when more of the money is spent on new workers.

I think the biggest problem, JT, is that your people do not have a balanced vision of how an economy works. We should not surrender all competitions we can’t win, because competition itself is integral to trade. Trade requires that people have both the economic power to buy imports, and that they have something to trade back which balances the scales. At the moment, we are importing more than we are exporting. That’s an economic problem right there.

Besides, he also said it was natural for the price of basic goods to go up in a developed economy. The world market situation will be temporary. The economic disorganization and dysfunctionality caused by just surrendering to it may not be so lacking in persistence.

Calling all democrats!!! Please some good democrat bid and buy the actual cigar Bill Clinton shoved up Monica lewinski’s twat. It’s still fresh and SMOKABLE (albeit a bit fishy smelling)and available on e-bay. Thanks…Terry M.