Look, there are rarely “right” or “wrong” answers when it comes to policy preferences. In other words, if you’re trying to solve a problem, you can often find good solutions whether you’re a fiscal conservative, a social conservative, a social liberal, or a leftist. The best debates are about which plans are the best.

On the other hand, there are politicians who are simply the wrong choice. These candidates lie about where they stand, what they believe in, and what their motivations are in running. Often, they are driven by ego more than anything else. Voting for George W. Bush in 2004 was wrong. It was a mistake, and our country is poorer for it. He remains a man who cannot admit mistakes. He believes Iraq is going GREAT and congratulated Mike Brown on a great job handling Katrina.

My fellow Connecticut residents who voted for Joe Lieberman have made a similar mistake. He lied to us, claiming he would work to end the war, that he would work with Democrats on other issues, and show leadership for the state. Instead, he’s spending 9/11 this year with Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity, is a fanatical supporter of the Iraq war, further military adventures in Iran, and is generally so far off the Democratic agenda on nearly everything else, I want him to switch parties. At least that would be honest.

He’s also taking lessons from Republicans on how to run government. According to a new GAO reports, DHS is a mess. While Sen. Lieberman is holding hearings, I doubt he will criticize the President. Anything but that, and anything but pinning the incompetence on the folks in charge for the bulk of the lifetime of DHS.

Democrats that voted for Lieberman, what the heck were you thinking?

If you had to rank the Presidents, where would President George W. Bush end up on the list? After looking at his domestic and foreign policy initiatives, there’s a strong case that he is the worst ever. Measured simply against his desired or stated outcomes, based on speeches or public comments, he has been particularly bad at delivering what he promises.

As a rough starting point, I’ve outlined the major policy initiatives of both Bush terms along with a grade from -5 to 5 where 5 is absolute success and -5 indicates he achieved the opposite result of his proposed aim. A score of 0 indicates he didn’t do anything (no cost and no benefit on this policy issue). I specifically am avoiding whether I think the policies constitute good policy or not. I’m also avoiding whether I agree with the policy or not.

I know this list isn’t complete, so I’d love to expand on it. Feel free to leave those ideas in the comments below as well.

Domestic Policy Agenda

Office of Faith-Based Initiatives - Score: 2 - Former insiders have claimed that the office is more a political prop and showpiece than an actual, functioning White House department. He gets points for creating this and not getting sued to oblivion and for inspiring state level departments in Republican states.

Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit - Score: 3 - This passed, though it seemed targeted at helping big pharma as much as senior citizens. Folks are finding the donut hole a rude surprise and many complained about the complexity of the plan. The combined effect has taken the shine off of this plan.

No Child Left Behind - Score: -1 - In terms of achieving it’s actual goals, little has actually changed for public schools. In fact, there’s little positive to report. On top of that, school takeovers and privatization have not yielded improved results. The costs to states has been high, especially since the federal funding has been insufficient or non-existent.

Social Security Reform - Score: -5 - Far from actually reforming anything, the President convinced the majority of Americans that doing nothing was preferable to doing something about Social Security. Further, it provided a rallying point for Democrats and showed the first signs of weakness in the Republican stronghold. All of this doesn’t actually matter for the score, though. It’s a -5 because the policy failed to address any recommendations of the various blue ribbon panels while his other spending agendas have raised the stakes for Social Security in the years to come.

Gay Marriage, Abortion, and Christian fundamentalism - Score: 2 - On gay marriage and abortion, Bush has continued to deliver nominal victories but little actual policy change. The most significant impact of his two terms will be the appointment of Alito and Roberts to the Supreme Court. Their impact on these issues has yet to be seen (I remain unconvinced that either will rule in any way that will eliminate Roe v. Wade), but these appointments will have lasting impacts upon many different issues. He’s passed precious few laws and merely maintained the status quo on both major issues beyond those appointments. DOMA was the law of the land from the Clinton years and gay marriage is still not recognized at the federal level and abortions are still free of federal interference. Large sums of money have been spent on abstinence-only sex ed programs with poor results. I can’t think of a success here, actually.

Foreign Policy

The Global War on Terror (or whatever it’s called now) - Score: -2 - Terrorism incidents are up over the last few years. Iraq is a mess and far from a beacon of stability in the Middle East. Osama bin Laden still runs free. Iran has not shifted from their support of terrorist organizations. Hezbollah and Hamas have won elections largely because the Bush administration doesn’t understand how these organizations become popular. Our foreign policy has helped those organizations become stronger and more popular. The Bush administrations prioritization prior to 9/11 significantly misjudged the world, and their actions since have hardly demonstrated any improved judgement.

North Korea - Score: -4 - Since declaring them to be part of the “Axis of Evil” North Korea has tested a nuclear device and largely ignored diplomatic overtures from Europe. Six party talks have been largely unsuccessful. Far from containing North Korea with strong rhetoric, North Korea has stood defiant. North Korea now could have an impact on negotiations with Iran.

Iran - Score: -4 - Inexplicably ignored until the Iraq invasion imploded, Iran has gained prestige on the world stage because of Bush administration policy. There’s really not a worse outcome for our Iran policy.

Etc.

Overall, he’s done a great job of message control and information management. Beyond that, I find little to be proud of. Have I missed anything? Leave it in the comments.

I watched most of the new documentary Hacking Democracy on Friday. The documentary covers the poor state of our new electronic voting machines, specifically focused on how easy they are to manipulate. The film also goes through some of the recent recount efforts in 2004, showing how recount laws prevent effective recounts from happening.

The movie clearly features Gore and Kerry supporters, but they make a clear effort to explain that it’s only the Republicans this time because they are the ones in power in the two states most directly affected by these vote count issues (Florida and Ohio).

The most surprising thing to me was hearing about some of the irregularities in the 2000 election. It was either the first time, or I have forgotten the same thing. The biggest was the negative votes given to Gore in Volusia County, FL. While the correct count was discovered and used in the final tally, the movie emphasizes that the investigation into the root cause ended when the recount effort ended.

In fact, my biggest takeaway was the importance of real recount efforts. I didn’t realize how much money and effort is only available when an official recount is underway. When the recount effort ended in 2000, the investigation stopped. When Kerry conceded in 2004, little was done to follow through on a recount investigation. Even when a recount gets underway, the actual recount process presents several opportunities for people to “rig” the recount so that recounts don’t happen, whether out of malice or simple mistakes.

I’m happy to see more people talking about these things. Katrina Vanden Heuvel has a decent article listing some reforms that would benefit both parties (and even third parties). Most of them are pretty interesting, but at a minimum, I would love to see a federal requirement that recounts must be possible by hand using ballots that a voter has personally verified. In other words, you can have electronic machines as long as they output a receipt that shows your votes that you then deposit in a box. The paper ballots, not the computers, are used for recounts. Or, you can just go back to pen and paper. They still do that here in Canada (I’m in Montreal this weekend) and it seems to work well.

You can learn more about reform efforts, including what you can do this election to help, at VerifiedVoting.org and Black Box Voting. This is a non-partisan issue, and one that should be important to us all.

(found the Nation article via Atrios)

What do you think?

Go to Google.
Type in: Failure
Click on: “I’m Feeling Lucky”

Did you ever get the feeling these were the real participants in last year’s debates?

So I found this website that attempts to track the political contributions of executives associated with various companies.

The problem is, while the website has made me feel better about patronizing Starbucks and Barnes and Noble, it has opened up a whole new can of worms.

Can I really live without my Krispy Kremes? And, assuming the first Domino’s entry is a mistake (as it surely must be), how do I satiate my pizza cravings?

Even thornier: is it better to drive to Shoppers Food Warehouse, which receives only a “neutral” rating, or to walk to Harris Teeter? (While Harris Teeter isn’t listed in the database, it’s a subsidiary of Ruddick Corporation, whose CEO, Thomas W. Dickson, has given significant amounts to national and North Carolina state Republicans.)

Sigh.

John Ashcroft resigned from his post as Attorney General, with a 5 page hand-written letter, including the choice quote The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved. The sarcastic lines are piling up in my head faster than I can type them.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/11/09/politics/main654651.shtml

Oh, and an old oil buddy of Bush’s resigned as well.

I found some fascinating ones via Crooked Timber today. They link to an analysis done at UMich by Michael Gaster, Cosma Shalizi and Mark Newman where they apply a few different ideas to the county-by-county returns from the election. One of the proportional maps comes out with this fascinating pieces of modern art:

Fascinating stuff. They also point out an interesting fact. If you had to guess which candidate had more counties in which he received 100% of the vote, which would it be? I was wrong. Check out the study and look at it.

I’m posting most of this stuff because I find it interesting more than anything else. I also think it points out that Bush’s mandate is not really a mandate. It’s a mandate in the sense that he has a second term, no one in his cabinet or administration explicitly seeking election like most second term administrations (e.g. the VP), and his party controls Congress. From what I see, a number of counties were won by 10% or less. Peel off those voters and things look a little better. The broad panicking being done by some Democrats is unrealistic and unnecessary. This wasn’t a big loss… it just happened to break in directions that we didn’t want. It broke, however, at the margins. Remember that as the hand-wringing continues. This President is still bad for America and bad for our future. I hope that in 4 years his legacy won’t be one that we’re trying to fix for decades to come.

One of my biggest rational fears of this next four years is that spending won’t get under control. We have one party in control of Congress and the White House. The last four years haven’t exactly done anything to make me feel comfortable about their spending habits. So, the question is whether the deficit really matters, or if the country will deal with it fine until we right the ship again.

Brad DeLong offers this primer on why this deficit matters. Today at lunch I was thinking about another potential problem, though down the road somewhat. What are the odds that countries might switch from using the dollar for trade to using the euro instead? In other words, is there a possiblity that one day demand for the dollar would come down dramatically? Would such a switch be smooth and gradual or a shock, say, when the first country switches? Well, coincidently, the Washington Post has a related article today that goes through some of the current situation.

Found via Josh Marshall.

Pandagon points out this Slate piece from Saletan. I think he’s got a point and I do actually like the idea. I worry, however, about some of the implications. One thing I liked about the Democratic campaign was that they more or less stuck to truths, even hards ones. No meaningless jingoism, no glossing over things where America may be at fault. The upshot of the Saletan suggestion is to simply make people feel good while talking about the bad that Bush is doing. Maybe I’m over-simplifying. Read. Discuss.

Kim pointed out the Salon piece in the comments of her post, but here is the piece again.. Haven’t read the whole thing, but it started out well. I’ll finish it later.

Maureen Dowd has a decent column in the Times warning of the excesses that may come with this faux mandate.

Finally, a couple of visual aids. USA Today printed a map that showed a LOT of red counties. Well, Crooked Timber posted a similar map of population concentraation… while it looks like a lot of red, it’s really pretty empty in a lot of those counties. Even more interesting is this map:

Shows you how close a lot of those counties were. You can find out more about this map, including a bigger version, over at the website of the man that put it together, Robert J. Vanderbei. No matter how you look at the red or blue breakdown, we know the differential is about 3.5 million votes. Big, definitely, but not as sweeping as the USA Today map makes it seem.

Well, I’m just now beginning to wrap my mind around what happened yesterday. When I turned off the television last night a little before 12, the sheer exhaustion of being up for 20 hours, much of that standing in the rain (and, later after the cold front moved through Cincinnati, the biting wind), meant that I was only dimly aware of exactly what was happening. Only this morning, in the (all too early) light of day did I begin to assess how we got from the positive expectancy of exit polls putting Kerry up in PA, FL and OH (which we eagerly followed on my Blackberry throughout the day - thanks, Hogan) to staring down four more years of… (I can’t yet bring myself to fully write that out.)

Much of this processing occurred during my drive back to Dayton to catch my flight. Of course, the initial reaction was sheer astonishment — how, exactly, is it that I live in the same country as people who, in 11 states, overwhelmingly voted to deny homosexuals the same rights to love and build a life together that the state affords to the rest of us? How, exactly, is it that I live in the same country as people who approve enough of these past four years to sign up for four more? And what on earth happens next?

Astonishment gradually gave way to determination. Determination to spend the next two years devoting whatever resources I can muster to helping the Dems take back the House, in an effort to restore at least that one small bulwark against an unchecked Republican “mandate.” (Can it really be that a 1% win, with no electoral votes from wide swaths of the country really constitutes a mandate?) I’ve heard Kerry’s call for cooperation, for “healing the wounds” that divide the country. While I respect Kerry for finding it within him to make that plea, I fear for the Democratic party if it grants Kerry’s request. Certainly, Republicans have shown no inclination towards going along to get along — just look at the agenda Bush pushed through, even before 9/11, despite the fact that he lost the popular vote, and, by any recount standard applied, the electoral vote. I’m afraid that any cooperation will inevitably end up being on the Republican’s terms, which will get us nowhere. Time and again the Republicans have played hardball, and the American public has consistently rewarded them with a greater consolidation of power in Congress. Let’s face it — the public doesn’t reward those who play the role of the nice guy. It’s time to dig in, and accept the role of the vocal opposition.

–

While a key focus of the party needs to be building the infrastructure and raising the funds to pick off the most vulnerable Republicans in the House (while shoring up any vulnerable Democrats), my few days on the front lines tell me that we can’t stop there. Something is wrong with our system when, at 6 p.m. the Saturday before the election, I’m taking a frantic call from the mother of a first time voter, worried that her daughter won’t get a chance to have her voice heard because Broward County failed to mail her absentee ballot on time, and then to compound the error failed to send it out overnight mail on Friday despite promising both her mother and an attorney from the ACLU that it would do so (Florida requires that all absentee ballots be received by the election board by 7 p.m. on Election Day, so that, even had the ballot been sent out overnight mail on Monday when the office reopened, there was no way to return the ballot in time). Something is wrong when minority voters receive calls on Election Day telling them that, because of heavy voter turnout at the polls, voting has been extended and they should wait and vote tomorrow. Something is wrong when a college student sends in his registration application six times, never receives a voter identification card, and is then dismissed with a racial epithet when he calls to request that it finally be sent to him. Something is wrong when poll workers send an 84 year old woman to three different polling places, leaving it to an attorney from hundreds of miles away to finally put her in contact with the county board of elections, so that she can finally be told that she’s registered to vote in yet a fourth polling location. And, frankly, I think something is wrong when a graduate student with two children, 14 and 3, is concerned about accepting a teaching position in Florida out of fear that a decades old felony conviction for marijuana possession would disqualify her from having the right to vote should she move there. (And for you “source” sticklers, no, I can’t point you to articles for each of these, but yes, I personally talked to each of the people involved.)

Certainly, we made a start this year. In Cincinnati alone, Election Protection had hundreds of people, from all over the country, crammed into the library of a church-turned-community center, all ready to be dispatched to over 40 precincts in the city. At my polling location, I was joined by five poll monitors from the Cincinnati Coalition for the Homeless (who came in shifts), one Democratic attorney from Kentucky (who, like me, was there from the time the polls opened — late — until the time the polls closed), and two poll monitors from the Bloomington, Indiana Coalition for the Homeless, who drove all the way to Cincinnati that morning to put in a three-hour shift. But that still wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough because there were precincts in Cincinnati we didn’t have the manpower to cover, it wasn’t enough because there were entire counties in Ohio we didn’t have the manpower to cover, and it wasn’t enough because there were dozens of states we didn’t have the manpower to even begin to cover. And it wasn’t enough because poll monitors on Election Day are too late to get the Miami student her absentee ballot on time, and too late to inform the lady working as a janitor that under Ohio law she has the right to vote despite the fact that she was convicted of a felony in her youth. But that is definitely not to disparage the role we did play. Tonight my mom asked me if I would do it again in four years. And as dispiriting as it was to spend all that time and money traveling to Ohio to help ensure a fair election, only to have it be the state that puts Bush over the top (not to mention the fact that I had the great “pleasure” of sharing a hotel with Bush my first night in Cincinnati, and of sharing a hotel with the Bush/Cheney Cincinnati victory party my last night there), I have to say yes. Yes because it was amazing to stand there and have person after person tell me that it was their first time ever voting, and to see how seriously they took it, despite the fact that many of them surely had more pressing concerns, like worrying about how to feed their family and how to keep a roof over their heads when their lease is up and they are booted out of their affordable housing so that the complex where the polling place was located can be torn down.

–

One last thought. I’ve had this discussion several times over the past few months, the most recently tonight. And for the longest time I could never understand it: how is it that the Republicans continue to garner such huge support down south, merely by framing the election around abortion, gays and guns, despite the fact that voting Republican is likely not in the financial best interest of many of their constituents? One would think that pocketbook issues would trump someone’s concern about what two consenting adults do in the privacy of their bedroom. But then tonight it hit me: I’m quickly moving into a tax bracket where voting Republican would be in my economic best interest. And yet I cannot even begin to fathom voting my financial interests over my conscience. And I think that explains much of the Republican base. Too many in the Democratic party (and I always counted myself among them) seem to assume that the way to cleave off some of the Republican base is to focus on populist messages that appeal to the pocketbook of the lower middle class. And that probably has its place. But we must begin to reframe the moral debate, to eliminate the perceived Faustian bargain many believe voting for the Democrats to be: voting for economic concerns at the expense of upholding personal moral values. Unfortunately, I don’t know how we do this without turning our back on traditional liberal values of equality and equal protection. But we need to find a way.

The hope is dead, Jim.

Question of the day: what does it say about your party if your leader in one of the congressional houses gets voted out?

Sub-question: Do we now think I have a chance at being elected “Karl Rove” of the Democratic party? I think in light of recent events, I might just have it in me.

He says upwards of 175,000 provisional ballots were potentially there. They’ve been doing this for 10 years and in the last Presidential election, they had a 90% rate for good ballots. Numbers still look bad for Kerry unless he has some ridiculous lead in the provisional ballots.

Update: It’s official now. Ohio is required to put Kerry in the win column. Of the states that are left, Wisconsin is the shortest path to that win. 242 + 10 (Wisconsin) = 252 which, when you add Ohio would mean a Kerry victory.

Also, California hasn’t been fully counted. The popular vote margin may decrease once the remaining 40% of the popular vote is counted.

OK, I’m really going up to bed now. I wanted to wait until Wisconsin was called one way or the other. If it were called for Bush, Kerry can only hope for a EC tie, meaning Bush wins when the House votes in a few months. In other words, keep the plane at Logan and concede. Nevada and New Mexico, while not locks, look like they’ll go to Bush. Iowa and one of NV or NM would also be as good as Wisconsin (Kerry needs Ohio + 8 to win).

Final Update for Tonight: Scratch all of this… it’s a formality, I think, but the margin in Ohio is too big for Kerry to pull it off. It’s over in all but actual electoral college votes.