Category Archives: Politics

Will the Democrats win — and then blow it?

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Very astute column by Martin Kettle.

The aftermath of November 7 will also pose a larger political challenge for the Democrats. The 2006 midterms will be best understood as an Iraq-led defeat for the Republicans, and for the president in particular, rather than as a victory for the Democrats. Americans will express their disillusion with the conduct of the war by electing Democrats in larger numbers than before. But this does not mean that the Democrats can be confident that they speak for America on other issues. If they want to crown this comeback by recapturing the White House in 2008, the Democrats must be clever, careful and clear.

The danger is that too many Democrats will draw the wrong message about themselves from their victory. It’s very easy to beat up on the Democrats for their many recent failings, ironically not least on Iraq, and sometimes those criticisms go impossibly over the top. Yet Tuesday may lull the party into thinking they are suddenly more in tune with American opinion on issues other than Iraq than they really are. The perils of blundering into excessive partisanship over the next two years are enormous. The process of fixing the Democratic party that Bill Clinton started a decade ago remains unfinished business. Yet somehow it needs to go on…

You bet. One of things that was truly appalling in the last Presidential election was how intellectually bankrupt the Democrats were. I still have no idea what they really stand for — and nor do they.

The key to votes

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From Ed Felten’s Blog…

The access panel door on a Diebold AccuVote-TS voting machine — the door that protects the memory card that stores the votes, and is the main barrier to the injection of a virus — can be opened with a standard key that is widely available on the Internet.

On Wednesday we did a live demo for our Princeton Computer Science colleagues of the vote-stealing software described in our paper and video. Afterward, Chris Tengi, a technical staff member, asked to look at the key that came with the voting machine. He noticed an alphanumeric code printed on the key, and remarked that he had a key at home with the same code on it. The next day he brought in his key and sure enough it opened the voting machine.

This seemed like a freakish coincidence — until we learned how common these keys are.

Chris’s key was left over from a previous job, maybe fifteen years ago. He said the key had opened either a file cabinet or the access panel on an old VAX computer. A little research revealed that the exact same key is used widely in office furniture, electronic equipment, jukeboxes, and hotel minibars. It’s a standard part, and like most standard parts it’s easily purchased on the Internet. We bought several keys from an office furniture key shop — they open the voting machine too. We ordered another key on eBay from a jukebox supply shop. The keys can be purchased from many online merchants.

Using such a standard key doesn’t provide much security, but it does allow Diebold to assert that their design uses a lock and key. Experts will recognize the same problem in Diebold’s use of encryption — they can say they use encryption, but they use it in a way that neutralizes its security benefits.

The bad guys don’t care whether you use encryption; they care whether they can read and modify your data. They don’t care whether your door has a lock on it; they care whether they can get it open. The checkbox approach to security works in press releases, but it doesn’t work in the field.

Update (Oct. 28): Several people have asked whether this entry is a joke. Unfortunately, it is not a joke.

It turns out that the same key opens the Nedap/Groenendaal e-voting machines that the Dutch government has decided are unsafe for the forthcoming November 22 general election! Truly, you could not make this stuff up.

Dont think — just report

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I followed a link from Jeff Jarvis’s Blog to Armando Ianucci’s Tate Britain lecture, and was very glad I did. He was talking about why British comedy now has so much political content. One passage stopped me in my tracks:

Comedy is so prevalent now, it’s cool by association. So politicians speak and act according to the rhythms of comedy. Labour trying to portray Cameron as a chameleon – it’s an attempted sketch.

This has come about for three reasons: politicians have stopped speaking to us properly, the media has stopped examining their actions in anything like a forensic way, and broadcast culture has become so watered down, so scared of fact, that people are less inclined to turn to anything other than entertainment for information.

Broadcast journalism today promotes itself not so much on what it talks about but on the method it uses: “Broadcasting 24 hours a day, correspondents in over 50 capital cities, giving you all the headlines every 15 minutes, up to six generations of journalists gathered in one newsroom, making you feel all the news you want to feel, even on Christmas Day.” Hi-tech software and speedy transmission makes everything instant news, but we lose sight of the skilled individuals who can process this random unstoppable flow of information and somehow construct a meaningful examination of it. We need narrative.

I found myself hungry for narrative in the build-up to the war in Iraq. Here, surely, were facts – or, indeed, a glaring absence of facts – that required piecing together. Here, surely, it was clear that political debate was operating on a curiously surreal level. We were being asked to attack a country on the basis that the weapons we knew (but couldn’t prove) it had would definitely be used against us, especially if we attacked it. This Alice Through the Looking Glass logic has continued after the invasion. Now, it seems, it was necessary to have invaded Iraq to rid the world of the terrorist cells who have flooded into the country since it was invaded. The terrorist attacks in London and mainland Europe since are, officially, unconnected with the invasion of a country that was invaded because it had links with terrorist attacks in mainland Europe.

My favourite quotation from the eminently quotable George Bush is a remark he made last year about the constant attacks on US troops in Iraq: “The insurgents are being defeated; that’s why they’re continuing to fight.” It’s a stunning reversal of all logic. Measuring success in terms of how far you are from success. An even stranger utterance came from Tony Blair at Labour’s 2004 Conference when he defended his actions by saying: “Judgments aren’t the same as facts. Instinct is not science. I only know what I believe.

“I only know what I believe.” I find that one of the most chilling statements uttered by a seemingly rational politician. Apart from the fact that it overturns about 16 centuries of western philosophy and questions the entire principle of scientific inquiry, it’s also, surely, how the Taliban get through their day…

Afterwards… I found it hard to believe that Blair had said that, so I checked with the text. He did say it.

I’m also reminded of the “balance as bias” phenomenon which came up in a something I posted in 2003 about Paul Krugman’s Harvard lecture.

The donkey in the room

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Nice piece by Michael Kinsley about the November 7 elections in the US…

This year does seem to be different. You hear people say – though rarely as forthrightly as the Times – that they are voting for the party, not the person. Well, more accurately, they say they are voting against the party, not the person. The Republican candidate for the Senate or House may be saintlike in general, no worse than muddled on the war in Iraq, and good on stem-cell research. Meanwhile the Democrat may be a grotesque hack just inches from indictment, whose views on Iraq are equally muddled with less excuse (since loyalty to the president is not a factor). Nevertheless, many people are voting for the Democrat simply out of anger at or frustration with the Republican party.

[…]

Even under the American arrangement there is nothing ignoble about voting the party line. It is an efficient way to minimise your information costs. Voting is an irrational act: your vote does not matter unless it’s a tie. And even 2000 was not a tie. The more effort you put into learning about the candidates, the more irrational voting becomes, and the more likely you are not to bother. A candidate’s party affiliation doesn’t tell you everything you would like to know, but it tells you something. In fact it tells you a lot – enough so that it makes sense to vote for your party preference even when you know nothing else about a candidate. Or even to vote for a candidate that you actively dislike.

True, people might question your sanity if you were to declare that you were voting for the Democratic party agenda. The what? If there’s anything worse than ignoring that famous elephant in the room, it’s imagining a donkey that’s not in the room. Even so, a vote for the Democrat is a vote against the Republican. And voting “no” to a record of failure is more important to the functioning of democracy than voting “yes” to any number of promises about the future.

655,000

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From Eric Alterman’s Blog…

This just kind of leaves me speechless and breathless: “A team of American and Iraqi epidemiologists estimates that 655,000 more people have died in Iraq since coalition forces arrived in March 2003 than would have died if the invasion had not occurred.” If the number is even half that, well then … I really don’t know to say.

Meanwhile, are these guys trying to protect us? More than five years after 9-11, only 33 out of 12,000 FBI agents have even a limited proficiency in Arabic, and none of them work in areas that coordinate investigations of international terrorism, here. (And don’t tell me they can’t recruit Arabic speakers. Five years is plenty of time to learn Arabic.) More bad news on that front here.

Meanwhile, speaking of this glorious adminstration’s bravery and competence, what really happened at Haditha? William Langewiesche takes 14,551 words in the current Vanity Fair to tell us, here, and it ain’t pretty. Well, neither is losing three sons, owing to the lies of your president. Our condolences …

And, oh yeah, North Korea.

(McCain’s straight-talking, mavericky solution? Blame Clinton. Brilliant. I sure hope he finds a way to get booked on ABC’s This Week someday.)

Dave’s Dilemma

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The Conservative party is no longer riven with ideological division in the public way it once was, but the “mods” and “rockers” are still there, tooled up and ready to rumble. Indeed some suspect that the peace exists precisely because Cameron has steered clear of making tough ideological pronouncements.

Amassed to the right of him there are those who have never forgiven the party for dumping Margaret Thatcher — a group that one moderniser calls “the head-banging Europhobic tax-cutters”. They want to see a flash of the old, a firm commitment to reducing taxes and an end to the “namby-pamby” politics of equal rights and work-life balance.

On the other side are the “über-Cameroons”, metropolitan-based modernisers who want their leader to go further in burying his party’s unpopular past and set out a more principled compassionate agenda. They value social workers above tax cuts and cheered Cameron’s recent apology to Nelson Mandela on behalf of the party for having once branded him a terrorist.

In short, there is a turf war going on for the soul of the Tory party and Cameron is caught in the middle of it. Until now he has made good mood music and given neither side anything substantial to get angry about. Now he is being asked to produce the beef.

[Source]

Brown vs Reid: the ‘people meter’ verdict

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Frank Luntz is an American pollster who believes in ‘people meter’ research — where members of a focus group indicate — second by second — by moving a knob whether they’re approving or disapproving of a political speaker. He did some of this research for BBC2’s Newsnight last week and was roundly criticised for his pains. Here’s part of his response.

In the past weeks a number of Labour-leaning columnists have laid out the case for why Gordon Brown should be the next leader of Labour. But what you never hear is why he will be the next elected prime minister.

Interestingly, the voters in my session came out clearly in favour of John Reid, not Gordon Brown, as the next party leader. Polly Toynbee, writing in The Guardian last week, suggested dismissively that it was just because of the “hesitant” Brown response to a reporter’s questions about his role in the leadership coup and “the full-on harangue” Reid recently unleashed against the legal system.

Actually, she’s correct — but she ignores the significance in her conclusion. You be the judge. Here’s exactly what Reid said that made the Labour-leaning voters sit up in their seats, nod their heads and cheer: “Any system which allows foreign prisoners back on our street without even considering deportation has something wrong with it — full stop. No qualifications. A court judgment that puts the human rights of foreign prisoners ahead of the right to safety of UK citizens is wrong — full stop. No qualifications. A Parole Board decision that emphasises the rights of a convicted murderer over the rights and safety of his potential victims is tragically, murderously wrong — full stop.”

The “people meters” soared, and it was the single best-received language of the evening. To Toynbee that was a full-on harangue. But to Labour-leaners and floating voters it was good plain common sense. Could you imagine Brown speaking with such emotional clarity? Could you imagine Brown with such steely determination?

I dislike Reid intensely. He is a typical ex-Communist thug who has simply done a 180-degree ideological shift. These guys never change their spots. But there is one silver lining in the cloud of a possible Reid leadership. Roy ‘Fat Boy’ Hattersley has declared that he will shoot himself if Reid becomes Labour’s leader.

McCain shows Cameron the price of power

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Insightful column by Andrew Sullivan on Dave Cameron’s new friend — and conference speaker — John McCain.

Last weekend turned into a pivotal moment in his [McCain’s] career. For the past four years he has fought the Bush administration’s attempt to authorise interrogative abuse of military detainees. As a victim of torture himself McCain’s credentials for this fight were enormous. And, to his credit, his legislative efforts have indeed put a stop to the widespread abuse that has occurred in the regular military since the winter of 2001.

But he wants to win the Republican nomination; and Karl Rove, Bush’s political guru, has decided that the only way to rescue the mid-term elections is to run on who can be tough enough on terror suspects. If McCain had refused to compromise over torture he would have essentially been destroying the Republican game plan for retaining Congress. So Bush called him out.

The deal they struck was simple: Bush wouldn’t formally renege on Geneva and wouldn’t formally authorise waterboarding, hypothermia and other horrors.

But he was given legislative leeway to decide what to do with terror suspects (including waterboarding and hypothermia) and had authority to train an elite squad of CIA “coercive interrogators” for the purpose. His civilian officials would also be given complete legal impunity for possible war crimes committed in the past.

What did McCain get in return? Some cynics in Washington say the answer is simple: the nomination. And McCain has been doing his best to recruit many Bush loyalists. Did McCain sell his soul for power? That’s what his sharpest critics would say.

[…]

The Tories will cheer him this week. He is certainly much more congenial to the party of David Cameron than Bush, Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld. But McCain is also a symbol, along with Bill Clinton, of how power is never without its costs. One day Cameron may have the opportunity to share their pain.

Webcameron

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Ye Gods! And there’s poor ol’ Gordon Brown thinking he’s hip because he’s got an iPod. Not only does Dave ‘Vote Blue to get Green’ Cameron have a wind turbine and solar panels but how he has a video Blog. It’s called Webcameron, naturally. I’ve just watched his first post — shot in his kitchen with kids shouting and scenes of general domestic chaos. The man’s a genius — at PR.

Later… The semiotics of the first video post are interesting. For example:

  • Cameron is shown in his kitchen, washing up. [Message: I’m a ‘new man’.]
  • There are kids squealing for his attention in the back ground. One of them wants Daddy to wash his hands. Daddy leans down tenderly and says he will do it in a minute when he’s finished this video thing. [Message: I’m a caring Dad who’s got the work-life balance right.]
  • He squirts some washing-up liquid onto the dishes. It’s Ecover — an environmentally-friendly brand, not some nasty chemical stuff. [Message: I’m as green as they come.]
  • We are given a glimpse beyond the kitchen where a baby sits happily in a high chair. In between Dave and the baby is what looks suspiciously like a clothes-horse with some garments airing on it. The scene is of agreeable domestic chaos. [Message: I may be Party Leader and the next Prime Minister, but really I’m just like you.]

    The more I looked at the post, the more inspired it seemed as a piece of PR.