Well, it’s over.
Kerry’s got Ohio, and I guess Edwards decided that (and NY and CA) cinched it even if he has a strong chance in Ohio.
The source is Americans for Democratic Action.
They rate senators based on their votes on ‘liberal’ issues. The most liberal rating is 100%.
Here are the scores for Kerry and Edwards over the past few years. And for comparison, for those who think those scores represent a ‘moderate’, I’ve added the scores for John Breaux, who IS a moderate Democrat:
Kerry Edwards Breaux
2002: 85% 70% 65%
2001: 95% 95% 55%
2000: 90% 85% 50%
1999: 95% 90% 80%
That should’ve been Georgia. They’re running neck and neck there; it seems Kerry will get Ohio by a large margin.
I’m baaaack! First of all, mywaynews is now reporting Edwards has just decided to bow out:
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20040303/D812IVIO0.html
I don’t vouch for the accuracy of this report, just putting it out there.
Anyway, we got a total of 34 people voting all freakin’ day; we were on the low end of the eight voting machines but not far below the average. Not much interest out there; my cow-orker called her sister and nagged her and sis essentially said that Kerry was a shoo-in in New York so why bother?
Hmmm…CNN is saying just now that Kerry was a shoo-in in New York. OK. Georgia as of 10 EST is still a horse race. VT went for their old gov Howie, awwwww.
You get to vote for five delegates in NY while not having to vote for a particular candidates so we had the unusual situation of candidates getting no votes (Wes Clark, Lieberman, and Dean) under their own names but getting a few delegate votes here and there, usually popular local pols. Heh. Even Sharpton got one vote under his own name, though; only guy to get absolutely no votes and no delegates was–surprise–Gephardt. OK, LaRouche got all zeroes too but I should hope we’d all expect that.
So, a long day, a dull day, and BTW, my particular booth, according to the black numbers read off the 40-year-old machine, went 14 for Kerry, 14 for Edwards. We tend to be social conservatives 'round here.
Whoop, CNN just gave GA to Kerry. And he’s beating Edwards in OH handily.
Kerry got every state tonight except Vermont, which went to Dean. Go figure. I guess the history books won’t be able to say Dean was shut out…
That Sam Stone keeps parrotting the “Kerry is too liberal” bullstuff without specifying what positions Kerry takes to warrant that claim. And no, a handful of numbers from one group doesn’t count; I’m talking policy points. I could, after all, point to Kerry’s support of NAFTA, welfar reform, and faith-based programs as examples of how his views aren’t as way-out-left as Sam wants to believe.
Only for the zombie hordes of the conservative right, who view anyone left of Dick Cheney as “too liberal”:
When Dean was the front-runner, Sam Stone was squaking that he was “too liberal.” Now Kerry’s the front-runner, so Sam just changes the names and repeats the same propaganda. Frankly, I’ve seen eighth-graders with more insightful analysis.
Listen up, sparky. I posted an opinion. I backed it up with a high-quality site. I explained the methodology for the conclusion, which is that a liberal activist group ranks house votes by their faithfulness to the liberal agenda, and under that standard, Kerry and Edwards both scored very high.
Feel free to attack the methodology, or the organization. What you AREN’T free to do is attack me personally. Which you do incessantly. So why don’t you take your snotty attitude and your endless stream of personal insults, roll it up real tight, and cram it?
Anyone can pick and choose a few issues and prove anything. Is Bush a liberal because he supports “undocumented workers”? Every analysis I’ve seen that looks at the **total voting record ** of Kerry puts him on the liberal side of the aisle. If you have one that doesn’t, bring 'em on.
The funny thing is, Kerry (who is undoubtably liberal) will run away from that label as fast as he can and Bush (who, it can credibly be argued, is not a conservative) will embrace the conservative label.
And we can wrangle about how those labels are meaningless all day long, but many of the voters in the '04 election will want to use those labels to decide how they vote.
Since Sam’s introduced the ADA scale (wow, I’d forgotten they were still in business!), let’s use it just for experimental purposes as a guide to the political landscape. What does it tell us?
Looking at the 2002 Senate numbers alone, which are (a) most current, and (b) easy to work with, since the Senate was divided 50-50, counting Jeffords as a Dem, we find this:
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The Senate had a pretty clear ideological division. Out of 100 Senators, 98 scored either 35 or below, or 65 and above. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) scored 50, Lincoln Chafee (R-RI) scored 45, and that was the entire representation of centrism in the Senate, at least by the ADA’s lights.
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The Democrats were the liberals, scoring 65% or higher, and the Pubbies were the conservatives, scoring 35% or lower. The only exceptions to this were the aforementioned Nelson and Chafee, plus Zell Miller (DINO-Ga.) who scored 30%. I grew up in an era when there was still a fair bit of overlap between conservative Dems and liberal Pubbies, but that’s history.
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The polarization is more pronounced on the right than the left: out of 50 Republicans, 37 scored between 0% and 10%, 7 between 15% and 25%, and 6 scored 30% or above. Out of 50 Dems, 22 scored between 90% and 100%, 18 scored between 75% and 85%, and 10 scored 70% or below. The Dems had mean and median scores of 83.5% and 85%, while the Pubbies had mean and median scores of 11% and 10%, respectively.
Regrouping the GOP (you’ll see why in a minute), 21 were 0% or 5%, 20 were 10% or 15%, and 9 were at 20% or higher.
So if we give the Republican right and the Democratic left roughly the same number of bodies (21-22), ditto the GOP and Dem centers (20-18), and ditto the GOP left and Dem right (9-10), you get 75%-85% being the Democratic middle, and 10-15% being the GOP middle.
Breaux is NOT a moderate Democrat; he’s a conservative Democrat. Edwards is a moderate Democrat; Kerry is a liberal Democrat.
But it doesn’t matter much, quite frankly. The differences between Kerry and Breaux are about half the size, by ADA measure, of the chasm between the two parties’ centers of gravity, and are about the same size as the virtual no-man’s land between the two parties.
I’d have to strongly disagree with John Mace’s contention that GWB can credibly be argued not to be a conservative. Economically, he’s a starve-the-beast, cut-taxes-for-the-rich conservative; on defense, he’s quite the hawk; environmentally, cutting trees and drilling for oil is his answer to everything; his court appointments have been quite conservative; he’s done his best to try to get as much Federal money as he can in the hands of conservative religious groups; he’d like to privatize Social Security without paying the transition costs, which means cutting benefits drastically; and so forth. And his people have just come out and said he’s going to run on gays, guns, abortion, and a flag-burning amendment. That’s conservative, by a mile.
His occasional forays into moderation have clearly been more for show than anything else, and as such have been hamstrung in various ways: No Child Left Behind has been underfunded, as has the African AIDS intiative; his Medicare prescription drug benefit seems to be designed to be as much a giveaway to employers and the drug industry as to help seniors, and it remains to be seen whether it will actually succeed in helping seniors much.
The environment must be considered as well, no Congresscritter operates in a vacuum. And ever since the Newt Gangrene Putsch, the Capitol has been infested with the minions.
Which is to say, if Kerry had the opportunity to vote against a bill he thought too liberal, he might well have taken it. Under present circumstances, given the structure of committees, and all, this is vanishingly unlikely.
Now, if the political spectrum of the Congress ran from Democrats on the conservative wing, and the Trotskyist/Green Alliance on the liberal side, it might well be a different story.
One thing I haven’t seen discussed yet on this thread: Is this “Haitian coup” business going to help Bush or hurt him in November? How will the American people feel about it? (See the concurrent GD thread, “Haiti: Was this a U.S. backed coup d’etat?” – http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=242586.)
Part of the problem here is trying to seperate Kerry’s “true beliefs” from his voting record. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if you had a heart-to-heart honest discussion with the guy, you’d walk away thinking he was a moderate Democrat. But looking at his voting record, he seems to pretty much tow the party line, which tilts away from the moderate wing of the party. I think the press is going to rip him apart because of that, and he’ll spend way too much of time re-explaining himself.
So, which is the real Kerry-- what he believes in his inner-most self, or how he votes in Congress? I say the latter. You can believe whatever you want, but your actions define who actually are.
It’ll be a distant memory. Nobody cares about Haiti, as long as we don’t get swamped with refugees.
John’s exactly right on that. Unless hundreds of thousands of Haitian refugees invade Miami and burn it to the ground no one will give a damn in November about it.
Actually, the intervention is probably partially targetted at making sure that doesn’t happen. This is an issue that can only hurt the President so it’s best for him to head it off right now.
Why? Bush got a free ride for the last four years doing the same thing. Or am I the only one who remembers “I am a uniter, not a divider,” “I don’t believe in further American interventionism abroad,” “I believe in fiscal responsibility”, and all those other moderate-sounding positions that got tossed out the window once the inauguration was over? (We can start with Paul O’Neil’s revelations that Bush planned a war with Iraq from day 1, for instance).
Wow. Ironic much? 
[Moderator Hat ON]
rjung, Sam, please take it to the Pit.
[Moderator Hat OFF]
I never said the press **won’t ** go after Bush, too. But for most of the things you are talking about, he can claim “9/11 changed all that”. Whether or not that is true, it does work with a lot of people.
But the press will go after Kerry with more intesity, I believe. The press is in the business of selling news, and Kerry is the new guy. People know about Bush, and the story of his change on the issues has already been played out. Bush has defined himself already in the voter’s minds. Kerry hasn’t. And don’t underestimate (I’m sure you won’t) Rove’s role in putting Kerry on the defensive-- his main task now will be to try to define Kerry before Kerry gets a chance to define himself.
The Pew folks went out and polled last week, from 2/24-29. In the usual “Who would you vote for, Bush or Kerry?” question, Kerry came out slightly ahead (48-44%), but more interesting is their look at who’s solidly Bush, who’s solidly Kerry, and what the swing voters look like.
The first interesting thing is, Pew says there’s far more of them out there than the CW says: they have 33% for Bush no matter what, 38% for Kerry no matter what, and 29% that say they are either genuinely undecided, or leaning but persuadable.
The Pew folks then slice and dice the demographics of each of those three groups. Read the details here.
I’d say it gives both sides reason for optimism, but Kerry slightly more so than Bush. The undecideds/persuadables look more like Kerry people than Bush people in a number of ways, especially gender distribution, racial distribution, and to a lesser extent, religious distribution. The good news for Bush is that there are more Bush leaners than Kerry leaners at this point.
Big thing is, the undecideds/persuadables agree with Bush about the war, and with Kerry about the economy.
NOW will people believe me that this’ll be close?
Nope.
I believe it will probably be close.
But I really do think there’s about a one-in-ten chance of a Dem landslide in November, a 1994-in-reverse gullywasher where they retake not only the Presidency by a large margin, but also at least one house of Congress.