The Agora

Scoo-TER! Scoo-TER! Scoo-TER! Scoo-TER! Scoo-TER! Scoo-TER! Scoo-TER! Scoo-TER!

[Resurrecting an old Agora tradition, "The Times They Are A-Changin'" is playing once again in the Anders household.

"C'mere Gabe, c'mere. Watch the bastards squirm!"]

[Hey, fuzzy-headed, unfounded optimism is a benefit of being a liberal. It says so on the membership card)
6:50:45 PM    comment []trackback []

But

I'm keeping my own council on this post of his, where he takes issues with Dean's recent comments about the transferability of his supporters.

But then Dean goes on to imply (once again) that his supporters won't support another Democratic nominee.

"I don't know where they're going to go, but they're certainly not going to vote for a conventional Washington politician," the Timesquotes Dean as saying.

The Times goes on to say ...

Though Dr. Dean has repeatedly said he would back whichever Democrat wins the nomination, he said Sunday that support was "not transferable anymore" and that endorsements, including his own, "don't guarantee anything."

"Right now those guys think we're the front-runner, so they're saying all this stuff, `He can't win'," Dr. Dean said. "How are they going to win?

I don't care if Dean says he'll endorse whoever wins. He's playing the defection card. And that crosses the line.

I don't doubt that it would be hard to reconcile some Dean supporters to another Democratic nominee. But that's not the point. By saying it, he's leveraging it, and encouraging it.

First of all, in the quote above, Dean succinctly sums up why I support him. "How are they going to win"?. There are things I like about Kerry, Lieberman (not much, granted) and Edwards, Gephardt and Clark. But these guys just don't have good campaings. They can't even get large numbers of Democrats to support them. Kerry seems to hope his resume is enough and it took Gore's endorsement of his rival and the capture of Saddam to give Lieberman a boost. I'm not optimistic about the chances of Dean vs. Bush, but given the campaigns I've seen the other Democrats run so far, I don't think they have any chance. I'd love to be wrong, but until one of the other primary candidates gets aggressive and starts taking chances, I'm going to back Dean, and I think he's right to ask what the others have to offer.

I don't know why Dean made the remark about his support not being transferable--and he may very well have made it for all the wrong reasons--but he might have said it because he believes it to be true. Many of Dean's supporters are young, many have never voted before, and when you see them in news reports, they are glowing with excitement. It is very possible that his most fervent followers may not shift to another nominee, and a group of potential life-long Democrats might be lost the the party.
7:08:58 AM    comment []trackback []

Why aren't workers sharing in the so-called boom? Start with jobs.

Payroll employment began rising in August, but the pace of job growth remains modest, averaging less than 90,000 per month. That's well short of the 225,000 jobs added per month during the Clinton years; it's even below the roughly 150,000 jobs needed to keep up with a growing working-age population.

But if the number of jobs isn't rising much, aren't workers at least earning more? You may have thought so. After all, companies have been able to increase output without hiring more workers, thanks to the rapidly rising output per worker. (Yes, that's a tautology.) Historically, higher productivity has translated into rising wages. But not this time: thanks to a weak labor market, employers have felt no pressure to share productivity gains. Calculations by the Economic Policy Institute show real wages for most workers flat or falling even as the economy expands.
6:55:58 AM    comment []trackback []

A Nuclear Headache: What if the Radicals Oust Musharraf?. Two recent assassination attempts against Pakistan's president have renewed concern in the Bush administration over the security of its nuclear weapons. By David E. Sanger and Thom Shanker. [New York Times: International]
6:47:11 AM    comment []trackback []

It's a long post. This is just a teaser to push you over there to read the whole thing.

If anyone wanted evidence that the "war on terror" is primarily a political marketing campaign -- in which war itself is mostly a device for garnering support -- they need look no farther than the startling non-response to domestic terrorism by the Bush administration.

This failure is particularly embodied by the Texas cyanide bomb plot -- largely because the refusal by John Ashcroft's Justice Department to give the story significant media play is problematic at best. Considering that Ashcroft leaps to the podium at nearly every turn in announcing the arrests of potential Al Qaeda-oriented terror suspects -- not to mention the readiness of the Department of Homeland Security to raise the "threat" level to Code Orange -- the silence in the Texas case is disturbing.

6:37:11 AM    comment []trackback []