Congressional Quarterly rates the 2nd Congressional District “leans Republican” in its final analysis before the election. It doesn’t rate the 1st District as competitive.
UPDATE: A poll by RT Strategies and Constitutent Dynamics has Hodes up 50% to 47%, and its sample was skewed slightly Republican, with 30% Republican, 27% Democratic. You can see it here (pdf). The numbers suggest that Bass is having a problem attracting female voters, and that Hodes is attracting a significant percentage of Republicans.
The Cook Political Report handicaps the race as “leans Republican to tossup.”
And of course, Evans-Novak labeled the district “leans Dem” last week.
John Kerry made this joke Monday night, and he’s been paying for it ever since.
What he said: “You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.”
There are three possibilities:
1. He believes that the military is a dead-end career suitable only for those too dumb or uneducated to find better work.
2. Knowing his audience, for political gain he perpetuated the stereotype that military personnel are too dumb to find better work.
3. He was saying that President Bush got stuck in Iraq because he didn’t do well in school. That would be the same President Bush who scored slightly better grades at Yale than Kerry did.
Some advice for Sen. Kerry: Leave the jokes to someone else.
I haven’t had a chance to blog the Bass/Hodes and Lynch/Coburn debates, and at this point it’s a little late to go into detail, but I’d like to go over a few points.
First, Bass/Hodes.
I thought Bass won, and here is why. Bass was much better prepared, he successfully parried several Hodes attacks, and he remained unruffled and confident throughout. Bass was really impressive, very quick on his feet; I hadn’t remembered that he was such a good debater. Hodes made several blunders. Having your facts corrected by your opponent — more than once — is never good. That said, Hodes did very well. He’s become a much better debater and campaigner than he was two years ago. He was confident, calm, made his points clearly and mostly effectively, and never let up or lost his way. Though I thought that Bass won, I can see how a lot of people would’ve viewed it as a draw, and of course the draw goes to the challenger. So although Bass definitely got the better of Hodes on points, substance and style, Hodes acquitted himself well enough to come out of it perceived as a credible and serious challenger.
A couple of moments stood out, and I’m going entirely from memory here.
1. “National health care.” Hodes said it twice. He said exactly what he meant. He did not say “nationalized health care.” A split hair, but an important one. Bass charged that Hodes supported “socialized medicine,” but that’s not what Hodes said. However, I happen to think Hodes does, in his heart, support socialized, single-payer care. I think this because I interviewed him the day after the debate and when I asked, he refused to say he would vote against it. He wants all the options on the table. That’s the phrase Bass used when speaking of private accounts for Social Security. Bass wants private accounts. Hodes, I surmise, really would not mind single-payer care, though he is sharp enough not to hold the delusion that it would be a cure-all. He understands at least some of the problems it entails and at least acknowledges that consumer choice has great advantages.
2. Second Amendment? What 2nd Amendment? This was one of those beautiful debate moments. Asked their thoughts on the 2nd Amendment, Bass hit a home run, or should I say he hit the target? He really knows his position on it, and has the NRA endorsement. Hodes had no idea what he was talking about. He first said he supported the rights of sportsmen and hunters to have firearms. The 2nd Amendment uses the word “people,” not sportsmen and hunters. He then said it was a state issue the federal government should stay out of. So, states can ban guns? No. It was as if Hodes had never given the 2nd Amendment a single thought.
3. 1999 came before 2001. Hodes quoted a Bass criticism of President Clinton’s military action in, I think, Kosovo, and asked how Bass could oppose that but favor the Iraq war. Hodes thought he’d nailed Bass, but Bass said that 1999 came before Sept. 11, 2001, and we live in a different world now but Hodes still lives in a pre-9/11 world. That was brilliant debating.
That’s enough about that debate. How about Lynch/Coburn? I think this picture of Jim Coburn says it all:
I caught most of Jeb Bradley’s debate with Carol Shea-Porter (a mischievous baby distracted me from some of it), and when it was over I couldn’t help but think that Shea-Porter blew a big opportunity to win over undecided voters, assuming any were watching.
An informed observer I talked with this morning said she did better than he expected. She did worse than I expected. Bradley is not a skilled debater, and Shea-Porter had a chance to really shine by comparison. A little more levity, a little less smarminess, and she might have won the debate. But she just couldn’t hide her smugness. Her sarcastic, smartest-kid-in-the-room attitude really killed a lot of the points she was trying to get across, I thought.
She also was weaker on the issues than I thought she’d be. Maybe it was nerves.
Unfortunately for Bradley, he was off his game too. For a two-term representative, he seemed a little uneasy. Not nervous, just camera shy. He fumbled some lines and missed his chance to really take command of the debate. Plus, his shirt collar was waaaay too big for him. At times he looked a little like a turtle.
With Bradley’s weakness on TV, and Shea-Porter a by now experienced campaigner (though not on television), this was Shea-Porter’s chance to really establish herself as a serious candidate, as someone who comes across as informed, confident, and capable of responsibly handling the weighty issues on which a member of Congress must decide. I think she could have pulled it off. But she didn’t. Doing things like rolling one’s eyes and saracastically positing a conspiracy theory that the President somehow suddenly gained the power to control the price of gasoline nationwide is no way to be taken seriously. (For an excellent dismissal of the idea that the White House can manipulate the price at the pump, you can listen to this NPR interview with Vijay Vaitheeswaran of The Economist.)
End result: a draw.
Ari Richter has a good breakdown of the issues debated. And if I were eating soup while watching the debate, he would’ve been right. (You’ll have to read his blog entry.)
I attended the Politics and Eggs breakfast with Sen. Evan Bayh this morning, and I felt like I was back in the early 1990s. Does Bayh not realize that the Democratic Party has left Clintonism behind, or is he hoping that if he hits the rewind button enough the party will come back around to his way of approaching politics?
Bayh projected a studied casualness, wearing loafers and a tie that looked 10-years-old, but with the perfectly groomed hair of a University of Virginia student government member on picture day. His sonorous voice and calm delivery could easily belong to a small-town midwestern minister.
While Democrats are riding anti-war sentiment to possible electoral victory next month, Bayh didn’t even bring up the war. He seems to think that Americans don’t really care much about that but instead are clamoring for a new energy policy and government stimulation of private research and development investments.
I counted seven broad topics he addressed in his speech. They were, in order:
1. Energy independence.
2. Technological innovation.
3. Economic leveling — taking from the haves and giving to the have-nots.
4. More government subsidies of higher education.
5. Sound fiscal management.
6. Health care.
7. Foreign policy.
He said exactly one sentence on foreign policy in the main body of his speech.
I left thinking of a line from one of the Harry Potter movies, I think the first one, when Ron commented to Harry about Hermione’s strange behavior.
“She needs to sort out her priorities.”
Blogger Michael Yon has a very important piece in The Weekly Standard about the U.S. military’s responsibility for suppressing press coverage of the war in Iraq. Yon, famous for his blog’s impressive coverage of the war, details how one commander is refusing credentials to reporters requesting embeds to cover U.S. forces. Yon argues, and he is right, that al-Qaida is winning the media war and the military had better get its act together fast.
I attended Officer Briggs’ funeral procession on Saturday, and what struck me most were the tears. Not surprisingly, many women were crying. But tough-looking men were weeping too, lots of them. Everywhere people were wiping their eyes and choking back sobs. It was as if everyone in the city had lost a friend.
The other striking aspect was how somberly beautiful it all was. It was beautiful in its dignity and reverence for Officer Briggs, in its bonding of the community toward a common purpose, and in the way that God seemed to have cleared the sky and decorated the maples, oaks and poplars along the route, as if to pay his own respects.
I attempted to make a small photographic record of the procession for those who couldn’t make it. The image quality has been greatly impaired by shrinking the pics with my second-rate photo editing software, but I think the images still provide a decent summary of the morning prior to the memorial service. These are a few of the shots I took. I didn’t do any closeups of people crying. Just didn’t feel like interrupting them.
Laura Knoy interviewed Carol Shea-Porter on The Exchange this morning, and if you live in the 1st District you must listen to the interview. In the first 10 minutes, Knoy’s tough questioning brilliantly exposed the utter emptiness of Shea-Porter’s position on Iraq.
Knoy would not let Shea-Porter get away with simply accusing Bush of having no plan and stating that, therefore, we must withdraw troops. She kept on Shea-Porter to explain her plan for withdrawal and post-withdrawal strategy. In response, Shea-Porter said, “it’ll sort itself out.”
That’s her exit strategy. Get U.S. troops out and let the Iraqi people fend for themselves. Let the civil war “sort itself out.” Could there be a more irresponsible, cold-hearted, shoulder-shrugging proposal? Oh, well, those poor Iraqis will get slaughtered by al-Qaida and the sectarian militias, but that’s not our problem because we never should have been there in the first place.
Shea-Porter advocated withdrawal because she said the war has emboldened the terrorists. Knoy asked a couple of times if pulling out would embolden the terrorists — as the terrorists themselves have said. Shea-Porter denied the obvious, that retreat would allow al-Qaida to claim another victory.
Shea-Porter even tried to claim that since Bush has stopped using the term “stay the course,” she was not alone in calling for withdrawal. What?
I understand the frustrations and even anger about the way Bush has conducted the war. I’m not happy about it either. But bugging out for the sake of bugging out is just as bad as encouraging Iraqis to rise up against Saddam Hussein and then refusing to step in to back them up when they took our advice. We said we’d stay there and help them establish self-government. If we leave before that is completed, we will not only look like cowards, proving bin Laden’s assertion that we have no stomach for a prolonged fight, but we will tell the rest of the world that we don’t keep our word and will abandon our friends as soon as helping them proves difficult.
That is a strategy for creating more enemies and losing more friends. It is Carol Shea-Porter’s strategy (and Paul Hodes’ as well).
Our Thursday editorial on Officer Michael Briggs:
A hero lost: Michael Briggs, R.I.P.
Thursday, Oct. 19, 2006
The citizens of a safe city will always take their safety for granted. Yet safety and security are not natural states; they are achieved at great cost.
In Manchester, more than 200 police officers do the dangerous work of enforcing the laws of the city. They are men and women who volunteer to protect the rest of us from those who would do people and property great harm if left unrestrained.
Officer Michael Briggs was, by all accounts, a star of Manchester’s force. Friends and fellow officers describe him as kind, generous, friendly, caring, loyal and courageous. Among the hundreds of outstanding officers who patrol the city, Briggs, a decorated former Marine, stood out.
On July 25, 2004, Briggs was one of four officers who rushed into a burning apartment building and rescued its 19 residents. Among those he saved were a teenager, blind and confined to a wheelchair, and the elderly woman who cared for her.
For his heroism that July night, Briggs received the Union Leader’s New Hampshire Hero Award and, on Oct. 16, 2005, the Congressional Law Enforcement Award. A year later to the day, while responding to a domestic violence call in central Manchester, he was shot in the head, allegedly by a career criminal he had arrested four years earlier. It was 2:45 a.m. He had only 15 minutes left on his shift.
Briggs, a bona fide hero with the medals to prove it, was not just an action hero. He was also a gentle, caring soul whose empathy turned lives around. Among the tributes to him from readers is an e-mail from a woman he once arrested, reprinted in the first column on this page.
“He was one of the nicest people I had ever met,” Jessica Burbank wrote. “He made me see my wrong and I haven’t gotten in trouble since. I respect him greatly.”
Michael Briggs was the kind of hero who chased down bad guys and rushed into burning buildings. He was also the kind who gently did his best to improve the lives of those who needed direction, whether they were boys on the Little League team he coached or criminals he encountered on his late-night patrols through the city.
Each and every night, the residents of Manchester lie sleeping in their beds as heroes like Michael Briggs walk the dark streets. Briggs risked his life, venturing into the unknown, so that we could let down our own defenses and sleep in peace and comfort.
Michael Briggs died defending the people of Manchester, almost all of whom he never knew, from violent predators who seek victims under the cover of darkness. We owe him an unpayable debt.
As we mourn his loss, let us make sure that Michael Briggs is never forgotten. Let us, in his memory, make this city safe again.
If you care about Manchester, you have to read John Clayton’s column today.
If you’ve driven at all in Manchester in the past month you’ve seen the Manchester GOP’s big signs urging residents to vote Republican because Republicans have kept New Hampshire “tax free.” They’re pretty good signs, except for the little flaw that New Hampshire is not “tax free” it’s “sales and income tax free.”
Evidently some Democrats, or those who sympathize with the Democratic Party, thought the signs were effective. This morning I saw three of them ripped to pieces — two in Manchester and one in Bedford. They weren’t removed; they were torn to bits, as if to send a warning to Republicans that if they dare replace the signs the new ones will suffer the same fate as the old ones.
Remember those “Stop the Coburn Gas Tax” signs? They were all over Manchester in late summer. Haven’t seen one in a while. Wonder where they went.
Fred Barnes predicts disaster for Republicans next month: Loss of the House and, at best, a one or two seat majority in the Senate.
