Eric Massa

Up until I last year I lived in New York congressional district 29. Two years ago, the contest was between Republican Randy Kuhl (incumbent) and Democrat Eric Massa. This year's election reprises that contest.

In 2006, the Iraq War was "pre-surge," still making daily newspaper headlines, and deeply unpopular. Massa's campaigned tried to seize on the unpopularity of the war and ran on a "I served in the military, and I'm against the war" platform. The race was within a couple points and it took a couple days after the election to figure out exactly who won.

My favorite moment of the entire campaign was getting a voicemail message on my cell from a Massa supporter who wanted me to vote for Massa because Kuhl voted in favor of "CAFTA: The Columbian Free Trade Agreement" which would "ship our jobs to Columbia".

Not being utterly ignorant, I knew the bill was the Central America Free Trade Agreement (or, actually - the Dominican Republic – Central America Free Trade Agreement). And having a basic grasp of simple economics, such as the principle of comparative advantage, I'm also not ignorant enough to think free trade is a raw deal. For those and a number of other reasons, I voted Kuhl.

Kuhl is nothing to write home about. He resembles everything I hate about the Republican party. In a debate this past week on a local Rochester TV station, Kuhl basically refused to admit that all the pork he's brought back to the district is, in fact, pork. And, as of tonight, doing a Google search on "Kuhl" and "pork" turns up a post on my blog as the top hit (in which I take Kuhl to task for his porking).

And yet, somehow, Massa winds up being even worse than Kuhl in my book.

Let me see if I can explain using this handy diagram of Massa's campaign (click for a larger version):



At some point, Eric Massa got a hold of a picture of Randy Kuhl and President Bush smiling in the back seat of a limo together. Massa uses this image in several of his TV ads and apparently, has a giant wall sized poster of it that he takes around with him.

Apparently, he thinks the good people of NY-29 can be swayed over like a bunch of 4 year olds using the juvenile logic of "see! see! see! Bush is like soooo evil, and Kuhl is like Bush and so Kuhl is evil. Look, look! They were even in a limo together! And they're smiling!!!!!!"

Those of us that aren't 4 years old say "Wow. Two politicians of the same political party were in a car together. And, what's the big deal again?"

Massa also continues to be anti-war and anti-trade. Given our success in Iraq but the trouble in our economy, I find the anti-trade position to be the more concerning of the two. A few weeks ago I responded on YouTube to his anti-trade ad with the following that I'll quote here:

In 1930, in an attempt to help a troubled economy, the government followed the advice Eric Masssa is advocating in this ad: to move away from free trade towards protectionism.

The result was the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, one of the central causes of the Great Depression.

By contrast, the United States saw great economic gains from NAFTA, a policy established under President Clinton!

Our current economic issues come from HUD, Freddie, and Fannie pushing subprime loans, NOT free trade.

I'll at least give Massa the benefit that he allows comments on his videos.

Perhaps the most concerning thing about Massa though, beyond his juvenile "Bush = Kuhl" rhetoric and stance on free trade, is that in his ads he promotes himself as an "independent voice" but he'd be nothing of the sort.

Massa's campaign is being supported by groups that are left-wing (like the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee) and far-left-wing (like the Daily Kos). These groups aren't giving Massa massive amounts of campaign cash to be "an independent voice."

They want him to be their voice and give left-wing Democrats even further control over the Congress. Or, as Daily Kos founder, Markos Moulitsas, puts it:

We have an imperative to take advantage of a historic opportunity to break the conservative movement's backs and crush their spirits. In the White House, that means getting Obama a broad popular and geographic mandate for change. In the House, that means annihilating the Republican caucus and working toward a 100-seat Democratic majority. In the Senate it means getting to a 60-seat filibuster proof majority.

Any typically Republican voters considering "going Democrat" this cycle may want to think about if they really want to see a filibuster-proof majority of Democrats in Congress under the control of Nancy "you have to rip their face off" Pelosi and Harry "this war is lost, and the surge is not accomplishing anything" Reid.

Finally, I'll leave you with a YouTube video I put together of Massa flatly lying about the Bush record on taxes. I did feel a little out of place putting together something that's an awful lot like an attack ad, but I'm so sick of hearing liberal politicians slander the "Bush tax cuts" as tax cuts that were only for the "super rich" that I thought it important to call one of them out on this:

MoveOn.org betrays US

This. Is. Shameful.



Despite what a very small fringe of the very far right might claim, wanting an (even immediate) end to the Iraq war does not make you unpatriotic. But running ads making a groundless claim that a U.S. General is treasonous does. MoveOn.org and the New York Times should be ashamed.

Bruce McQuain of QandO writes:

There are few times in my life that I've seen anything this deliberately despicable and vile put out by a political organization. Words simply fail me.

The perpetrators of this execrable ad should be ashamed of themselves. The depth of hate necessary to attempt this sort of character assassination is both irrational and toxic. The organization which put this together deserves only derision and scorn. And they should understand that I do question their patriotism. This is way over the line and is anti-American by any measure or metric.

Amen.

The fact they ran this ad even before Petraeus actually testified only adds shame on their heads.

John Kerry and other congressional Democrats are distancing themselves from the ad, and I applaud them for doing so. MoveOn.org "[stands] by the ad completely" however.

This war deserves new and continued debate. Third grade name calling that calls a general a traitor adds nothing to that debate.

Al Gore - Promoting Discourse

This is the third post of my three-part series on "Promoting Discourse". (The second was my my previous post, about Thank You For Smoking; the first was about Charlie Rose).

Perhaps you are surprised, given my political leanings to the right, that I'm writing a complementary post about Al Gore of all people. I'm a bit surprised as well. But discourse is about bringing opinions from all sides (and hopefully facts to back them up) out into the open in a healthy and productive way. No political party or group of people sharing a political philosophy have a monopoly on valid input about political discourse.

And Al Gore brings such input to the table. His new book, The Assault on Reason is precisely about the need for good public discourse.

A number of media outlets have spun the book to be something more sexy than I think it was intended to be. ABC News ran an article "Gore's 'Assault on Reason' an Assault on Bush", for instance. I'm sure feuding political figures makes a more attention grabbing story than "our public discourse system is broken."

Now, in fairness, I haven't read the book. I've read what excerpts I can find and listened through two interviews with Gore about it though. (One was, if you've been paying attention you can probably guess this..., with Charlie Rose. :D .)

Based on those interview and excepts, I think Gore's central message is summarized nicely in this excerpt of an excerpt from the book:

Why has America's public discourse become less focused and clear, less reasoned? Faith in the power of reason—the belief that free citizens can govern themselves wisely and fairly by resorting to logical debate on the basis of the best evidence available, instead of raw power—remains the central premise of American democracy. This premise is now under assault.

American democracy is now in danger—not from any one set of ideas, but from unprecedented changes in the environment within which ideas either live and spread, or wither and die. I do not mean the physical environment; I mean what is called the public sphere, or the marketplace of ideas.

In that much, allow me to strongly concur with Mr. Gore.

Rather disappointingly (and ironically), the two interviews I listened to about Gore's book (or at least, that was their intended topic), turned into good examples of what's wrong with current public discourse. (By the way, the second interview was on The News Hour, moderated by Gwen Ifill.) (Brief aside ... I used to be an avid watcher of the Gwen Ifill-moderated Washington Week program, until she tried to make Bill Bennett out as a racist over the whole Freakonomics thing. Talk about bad discourse... Now I'm perhaps overly critical of anything Ifill does.)

Anyway. The Rose and Ifill interviews of Al Gore on "The Assault on Reason" themselves assaulted reason. Neither interviewer could resist devolving into questions about political "horse racing." The question of "Will you run in '08" made up a good bulk of both interviews that should have gone to discussing his book further. In the Rose interview, Gore answered with good humor that he was "worried about being repetitious" with his answer. (In 2000, of course, Gore was chided for being too repetitious.)

Both interviewers also tried to goad Gore into small minded partisan bickering. Ifill wanted Gore to endorse impeaching Bush. Rose wanted Gore to call Bush a "liar." I applaud Gore for overcoming both lines of questioning.

People generally blame political parties for driving issues to extremes, but in this case both interviewers were the ones abetting the political culture of "wedge issues."

I can forgive Charlie Rose (to some degree; and even to the degree I don't, I still think he's the television interviewer most positively impacting public discourse) for his questions because they were taken from a pool of questions provided by the live auditorium audience in front of whom he was interviewing. The whole series of impeachment questions Ifill asked were downright ridiculous, irrelevant, and outrageous though. Partisan fueled impeachment is perhaps the antithesis of good public discourse and the reign of reason. The series of questions should have had no place in the interview.

Getting back to Gore's book, I should point out that I emphatically support his main message - that public discourse and reason is desperately missing from today's political landscape. In his book though, Gore takes this premise to the next step with an argument I don't buy. He uses actions of the Bush Administration as his "proof" that reason and discourse have gone out the window.

Gore makes the assertion that anyone that is rational would have never gone into Iraq. I share Gore's outcry that so little discourse occurred prior to the invasion. But I disagree with the assertion that had all the available intelligence been put out for review in a public forum, it would have been impossible for someone to have arrived at the conclusion to invade.

Gore includes a statistic that "three-quarters of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for attacking us on Sept. 11" in 2001. That's a huge failure in public discourse, but I never believed that and it didn't factor into my judgment, at the time, that going into Iraq was the right choice. (My judgment was primarily influenced by Iraq's failure to comply with U.N. Resolutions 678, 687, and 1441. I am continually baffled as to why Iraq didn't comply with them given the fact they apparently didn't actually have WMD... ("We aren't developing or hiding weapons, so we must interfere with your weapons inspectors!" is a huge non sequitur.))

On the whole though, I'm glad Gore is putting his influence behind fixing our use of "the marketplace of ideas." If he can gain nearly as much traction on this issue as he did on "climate change," the American people will be much better off.