Tag: Fred Kaplan

Kerry’s Last Stand.

How did it come to this? Once the frontrunner candidate for the Dem establishment, John Kerry is now facing defeat in must-win New Hampshire, and I don’t know if another campaign shake-up is going to do the trick. Even with Shaheen running Kerry’s team, the Granite State is probably Dean’s to lose at this point, and I’d think any move towards scorched-earth negativity on Kerry’s part is only going to redound against him. But, at this point, I’d guess Kerry’s running out of options…so it’s probably gonna get ugly, and soon. But if it’s any consolation to Team Kerry, he’s not the only Dem underperforming to expectation…witness the New Yorker profile of Wesley Clark, the frontrunner that wasn’t (although he does seems to be appealing to SC veterans.) Update: Well, when I said it’d get ugly, this isn’t exactly what I meant…two more officials fly the Kerry coop. Update 2: Fred Kaplan takes issue with the New Yorker piece.

The Recycle Bin of History.

Fred Kaplan wonders aloud about the perils of writing history in the e-mail era. I see what he’s getting at, but this argument cuts both ways. If in fact someone is saving administration e-mail correspondence (a big if, I know, but consider folks like Harold Ickes and Sidney Blumenthal in the Clinton White House), then there should be plenty of e-mails of conversations that would have been held on the phone throughout most of the twentieth century. Plus, so much more of government (at the highest levels, at least) is televised now, from subcommittee hearings on C-SPAN2 to Dubya’s 4pm photo-op with the Boy Scouts. Historians of the future should have their hands full.

Dropping the Other Shoe.

In a strange moment of candor, Wolfowitz tells Vanity Fair that the WMD argument for overthrowing Saddam was chosen “for bureaucratic reasons,” since “it was the one reason everyone could agree on.” (He also lends credence to the argument advanced in this Fred Kaplan article that removing troops from Saudi Arabia was one of the central purposes of the Iraq war.) Meanwhile, in the same AP story, the head of US Marines in Iraq says of the WMDs, “they’re simply not there.” Looks like the Bushies have some explaining to do…If they follow the usual pattern, I suspect they’ll answer any tough question with a flurry of 9/11-esque horror stories.