Hell Storm
I couldn't resist using that headline, found on the Drudge Report earlier this week used in regards to the coming Hurrican Frances. But that's also what's on the political horizon now that the Republican Angerpalooza has boxed up the Presidential Seal in the Round and is going on the road. It's been said that John Kerry is most focused as a political campaigner when he's focused on attacks lobbed at him. (It seems that's always been the case, going back to Vietnam.) And now, after many Democrats have been exhorting him to fight badk, he's finally had all he can take and he's not gonna take no more:

"The vice president called me unfit for office last night," Kerry told thousands of supporters who waited in the darkness to see him in Ohio. "I'm going to leave it to you to decide whether five deferments makes someone more qualified to defend this nation than two tours of duty."

[...]

Kerry offered up his own test for fitness to serve -- and he made it clear that he thinks Bush and Cheney fail it. "Let me tell you what I think makes someone unfit for duty. Misleading our nation into war in Iraq makes you unfit to lead this country. Doing nothing while this nation loses millions of jobs makes you unfit to lead this nation. Letting 45 million Americans go without healthcare for four years makes you unfit to lead this nation. Letting the Saudi royal family control the price of oil for Americans makes you unfit to lead this country. Handing out billions of dollars in contracts without a bid to Halliburton while you're still on their payroll makes you unfit to lead this country.

"That, my friends, is the record of George Bush and Dick Cheney, and that only begins to scratch the surface. This president has misled American workers and misled the American people."

When Republicans saw advance excerpts from Kerry's speech, they immediately did what Republicans do: They said the Democrats were angry. Appearing on CNN, first brother Marvin Bush said of Kerry: "He's got a very thin skin, this guy." Tucker Carlson talked dismissively of Kerry's "personal pique." But for Democrats growing increasingly worried that their presidential candidate would allow himself to be wimpified like Michael Dukakis did in 1988, the midnight speech was a welcome sign that the Kerry campaign might finally be awakening from its summer slumber.

And for once, the Kerry campaign played it perfectly. The campaign distributed excerpts from the speech Thursday evening, just as the final session of the Republican Convention was about to begin. In an instant, the TV pundits' agenda for the night was changed. Happy talk about Bush's acceptance speech disappeared, trumped by Kerry's defense of himself and his attack on Bush's dishonest rush to war. "He's on the right path now," Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich told Salon just after Kerry finished speaking. Kucinich seemed thrilled with Kerry's new approach. "What you saw here was the beginning of his victory. Mark the date."

Note the double standard that Republican pundits use (Josh Marshall's Bitch Slap theory in practice), that Kerry's thinn-skinned and can't take the heat.

As for Bush's speech last night, it was a good delivery. But it seemed weird for a convention speech from the party's Presidential nominee. It felt more like one of those State of the Union addresses that looks around at the landscape, makes some commentary about where we're at and how we're only gonna get better, then adds a laundry list of items that Congress should work toward. William Saletan of Slate agrees:

For $2.4 trillion, guess what word—other than "a," "and," and "the"—occurs most frequently in the acceptance speech George W. Bush delivered tonight.

The word is "will." It appears 76 times. This was a speech all about what Bush will do, and what will happen, if he becomes president.

Except he already is president. He already ran this campaign. He promised great things. They haven't happened. So, he's trying to go back in time. He wants you to see in him the potential you saw four years ago. He can't show you the things he promised, so he asks you to envision them. He asks you to be "optimistic." He asks you to have faith.

As Kerry said in his speech last night, the President doesn't have a shred of a positive domestic record to run on, so it's back to the time machine to remind everyone of the policies that Bush put forward back in 2000.

But what about some of the achievements of the Bush 43? He touted the fact that home ownership is at an all-time high. But did his term in office really contribute to that? From Salon:

While it's true that the percentage of Americans who own their own homes (69.2%) is at a record high, it's hard to attribute that to the current Republican leadership -- the rate has increased every year since 1993, and in fact, grew faster on average during the Clinton administration.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, When Clinton came into office, homeownership stood at 63.7%. Clinton left office with home ownership up 3.8% to 67.5%. Under Bush, it's gone up 1.7%.

The Associated Press nudges our memories with some facts about a few of Bush's assertions over the War on Terrorism and the Iraq Debacle:

President Bush glossed over some complicating realities in Iraq, Afghanistan and the home front in arguing the case Americans are safer and his opponent cannot deliver.

On Iraq, Bush talked of a 30-member alliance standing shoulder to shoulder with the United States, masking the fact that U.S. troops are pulling by far most of the weight. On Afghanistan and its neighbors, he gave an accounting of captured or killed terrorists, but did not address the replenishment of their ranks or the still-missing Osama bin Laden.

[...]

Nowhere did Bush mention bin Laden, nor did he account for the replacement of killed and captured al al-Qaida leaders by others.

Oh, and then there's this bit about mis-characterizing Kerry:

He attacked Kerry for voting against an $87 billion package for Iraq and Afghanistan operations that included money for extra sets of body armor and other supplies, mocking his opponent for saying the issue was complicated. "There's nothing complicated about supporting our troops in combat," Bush said.

But the bill in question was not solely about supporting troops and Kerry's campaign said he ultimately voted against it because, among other reasons, it included no-bid contracts for companies.

But, as Reagan once said, it's morning in America. And this morning, we're greeted with good news - the unemployment rate is back down to 5.4% (the lowest it's been since October 2001) and we added 144,000 jobs to the payroll last month. That's good, right? Berkeley economics professor J. Bradford DeLong has some other thoughts:

144,000 increase in payroll employment in August, just enough to keep us from losing ground relative to the growing labor force. A nonfarm employment level of 131.47 million--but according to the forecast the Bushies released last February, it was projected to be 133.18 million by now.

I, at least, would very much like to know how George W. Bush answers the following question: "What has gone wrong with the economy to leave us with an employment level 1.7 million below what you projected last February that it would be by now?"

The next two months are going to be, to quote the Stereo MCs, deep down and dirty. Bush is going to continue to whitewash the last four years while also reminding us of the losses we suffered on September 11, 2001. We can't let that happen. We have to keep his political feet to the flames and remind folks of the real achievements of this administration. Juan Cole sums it up best, using the analogy that Bush is the CEO of America, Inc. (which really isn't that far from the truth):

Let us imagine you had a corporation with annual gross revenues of about $2 trillion. And let's say that in 2000, it had profits of $150 billion. So you bring in a new CEO, and within four years, the profit falls to zero and then the company goes into the red to the tune of over $400 billion per year. You're on the Board of Directors and the CEO's term is up for renewal. Do you vote to keep him in? That's what Bush did to the US government. He took it from surpluses to deep in the red. We are all paying interest on the unprecedented $400 billion per year in deficits (a deficit is just a loan), and our grandchildren will be paying the interest in all likelihood.

And what if you had been working for America, Inc. all your life, and were vested in its pension plan (i.e. social security)? And you heard that the company is now hemorrhaging money and that the losses are going to be paid for out of your pension? What if you thought you were going to get $1000 a month to retire on, and it is only going to be $500? Or maybe nothing at all? Because of the new CEO whose management turned a profit-making enterprise into an economic loser? Would you vote to keep him on?

What if the CEO convinced himself that the Mesopotamia Corp. was planning a hostile takeover? What if he had appointed a lot of senior vice-presidents who were either incompetent boobs or had some kind of backroom deal going with crooked brokers, and fed him false information that Mesopotamia Corp. was making a move and had amassed a big war chest for the purpose? And what if, to avoid this imaginary threat, he launched a preemptive hostile takeover of his own, spending at least $200 billion to accomplish it (on top of the more than $400 billion he is already losing every year)? Remember, it was a useless expenditure.

It turns out that Mesopotamia Corp. was a creaky old dinosaur with no cash reserves, and couldn't have launched a hostile takeover of the neighborhood mom and pop store. And, moreover, its arena of operations is extremely dangerous, and nearly a thousand America, Inc. workers get killed taking it over. And it turns out that the managers that the CEO put into Mesopotamia Corp. were bunglers. They adopted policies that made the taken-over employees bitter and sullen and uncooperative. Instead of standing on its own, the wholly owned subsidiary of Mesopotamia, Inc., requires continued infusion of capital from America, Inc. It looks increasingly as though Mesopotamia, Inc., will have to be let loose, and that its new managers will opt for interest-free Islamic banking as soon as they can.

Meanwhile, the real threat of a hostile takeover comes from al-Qaeda, Inc. Because 138,000 employees had to be assigned to Mesopotamia, Inc., there are few left to meet that challenge.

So given this kind of record, do you vote this CEO back in? It is often said that a lot of Americans want to stick with Bush to "see Iraq through." But if you think about him as a CEO, and look at how well he has run things, you can see the idiocy of this argument. The real question is, do you throw good money after bad?