W43: Still Clueless In Fantasyland

17 March 2005 |permalink | email article

Well, it’s hard to know where to begin in describing the president’s fantasy state of mind these days - a mixture of stubbornness, ignorance and optimism. Read the transcript of his news conference and shake your head. Paul Wolfowitz nominated to head the World Bank? Terrible choice. Hezbollah’s need to prove it’s not a terrorist organization by laying down arms to support peace? Believe in miracles.

Time describes an awkward moment in one of the president’s recent roundtable conversations on Social Security. He asks an economist to explain why the retirement system is in a state of crisis and then interrupts him. “It’s an interesting lesson here, by the way,” he says to the Ph.D sitting with him on the stage. “He’s an adviser. Now, he is the Ph.D, and I’m a C-minus student - or was C-minus student. Now, what’s that tell you?” It tells me W43 doesn’t have a clue.

He has been described as relishing his role as “chief sales officer” on the road again and again to promote Social Security reform.  “I’m actually enjoying myself on these trips,” he said yesterday in discussing his trip to Florida Friday and then out West for Easter Week. The problem is that the more scripted dog-and-pony shows he conducts, the more skeptical the public becomes about his plan to rescue Social Security as a reassuring neo-FDR.

Only 35% of Americans now approve his handling of the issue three months after the blitzkrieg began, according to a new Washington-Post-ABC News poll. While about two-thirds of those polled believe with the White House that Social Security is headed for a crisis or possible bankruptcy without change, 56% disapprove of his approach. More telling is a move by the Financial Services Forum, an association of 19 chief executives of large financial services companies. It has decided to withdraw from Compass, the group that is leading the industry’s effort to increase support for the president’s plan beyond the Beltway.

Still, W43 soldiers on, suggesting that he has only begun to fight. While GOP Congressional delegation becomes more edgy about ‘06 elections, the Wall Street Journal‘s Jackie Calmes reported that conservative Democratic lawmakers, citing deficits, oppose a plan for private accounts that even the president admits won’t cure the problem. These so-called Blue Dog Democrats, mostly in the South, are angry over the intensity of both the president - and his party’s - campaigning against Democrats who backed him on tax cuts and the Iraq war.

Add it all up and it’s is a big coalition problem for spinmeister Karl Rove. The odds increase that no major legislation restructuring Social Security, W43’s top domestic priority, will take place this year. 

Media Notebook

The New York Times yesterday had an interesting piece on how the 2004 Kerry-Edwards Democratic ticket is morphing into a early shadow trial heat between rivals: the Massachusetts senator, asserting himself as never before in the Senate, and the former North Carolina senator who is quietly showing up at every fish fry and Kiwanis Club that will have him in both red and blue states.

But the riveting must read is a “Letter From Washington” by Jeffrey Goldberg in the 3/21 issue of The New Yorker. It offers a candid profile of Joseph Biden, the senior senator from Delaware who is the Democratic Party’s main spokesman on international affairs, and includes biting interviews and critiques with several prominent Democrats maneuvering for power in D.C. Biden, who has not ruled out another run for president in 2008, offers little positive about DNC chairman Howard Dean. He is the leader of a modest-sized faction described as “national-security Democrats.” They include Senators Clinton, Bayh, former Sen. Edwards, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson and many Clinton Administration foreign-policy officals, now in exile. 

L.A. Politic

A funny thing has happened in the runoff race for mayor of the pueblo. Incumbent Jim Hahn is challenging City Councilman Antonio Villaraigosa to a series of debates. That’s not surprising since Hahn, who carried just one of 15 Council districts in the primary, is widely perceived to be losing altitude and in serious danger of becoming the first mayor seeking a second term to be ousted since 1933. What’s surprising is that Hahn wants the debates to be about education in city schools. Former Assembly Speaker Bob Hertzberg, barely edged out by Hahn in the primary, was the only candidate who made breaking up the Los Angeles Unified School District his major issue. Both The Los Angeles Times Poll and Hertzberg’s own polling, especially in the San Fernando Valley and among Latino parents, indicated that education was the #1 concern of voters.

His opponents argued, while the media mostly snoozed, that the mayor could play only a limited role on the subject. Now, nine weeks before the May 17 runoff, Hahn and Villaraigosa are all of a sudden focusing on education and pledging to do all they can to solve problems in the L.A. public school system. Hertzberg, who argued during the primary that a mayor has the power to make changes, said he found the sudden conversion of the two finalists “hilarious because they mocked me when I first raised the issue.”

There is one interesting footnote here. In his frantic last minute to eliminate Hertzberg, the only candidate who had the constituency base among Jews, moderate Democrats and Republicans to keep Hahn out of the runoff, the mayor mounted a late TV assault alleging the former Assembly Speaker was a tool of Enron in the state energy crisis. It worked. But it was the covert operation mounted by the Hahn campaign against Hertzberg - a replay of a similar tactic employed to defeat Villaraigosa in 2001 - which smacks of hypocrisy. Tens of thousands of Republican voters in the Valley and other conservative strongholds received three recorded telephone messages attacking Herzberg during the last weekend of the primary . Significantly, one was from a recent former chairman of the California Republican Party criticizing Hertzberg for making education an issue because there is nothing the mayor can do about it. Go figure!

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