Tag Archives: Dick Cheney

Do Endorsements Matter?

Harris pretty much destroyed Trump in the debate, but as I keep reminding myself, this year, we can’t take anything for granted.

Nothing about this campaign is normal.

For example, seasoned political folks tell us that endorsements rarely make a difference, but then they’re focusing on the traditional endorsements issued by newspapers and political allies. It will be interesting to see whether the steady roll-out of very untraditional endorsements from sources that haven’t previously issued them will matter, and if so, how much.

According to CNBC, declarations for the Harris/Walz ticket include a recent letter from eighty-eight business leaders.

Eighty-eight corporate leaders signed a new letter Friday endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris for president.
Signers include former 21st Century Fox CEO James Murdoch, Snap Chairman Michael Lynton, Yelp boss Jeremy Stoppelman and Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen.

If the Democratic nominee wins the White House, they contend, “the business community can be confident that it will have a president who wants American industries to thrive.”

In the past, most business leaders have avoided taking political positions, based upon the common-sense belief that public support for one party would likely piss off customers belonging to the other party and would thus be bad for business. It is likely that the CEOs who signed this letter did so because of their conviction that a Trump victory would destabilize America and the economy in ways that would be far worse for business than some temporary partisan pique.

I think it’s unlikely that an endorsement from corporate leaders will matter to–or even be seen by– the average voter. But another group of endorsers is a lot more high-profile and far more unusual. They are the very visible Republicans who have publicly joined with “Never Trump” Republicans like those at the Bulwark and the Lincoln Project to support Kamala Harris.

A few days ago, I posted a copy of the letter signed by over 300 members of past Republican administrations, urging other members of the GOP to support Harris. Since then, both Liz Cheney and her father, former Vice-President Dick Cheney, have publicly come out in support of Harris, each of them confirming a personal intent to vote for her. (Interestingly, former Vice-President Mike Pence, who served with Trump, has said only that he will not vote for his former boss. Maybe he’ll write in “Mother”?)

Will those unprecedented endorsements–which in any other campaign would be politically earth-shaking–matter?

An article from ABC, announcing them, asked that question.

Big-name Republican endorsers of Vice President Kamala Harris are testing just how many disgruntled GOP voters are up for grabs in her race against a polarizing former President Donald Trump.

Former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, a member of pre-Trump GOP royalty, became the latest and most prominent Republican to back Harris Wednesday. Harris also has endorsements from former Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., and hundreds of local Republican officials to try to puncture what her campaign views as Trump’s soft underbelly with Republican voters who are uncomfortable with the former president’s brash and unorthodox brand of politics.

The campaign’s consistent outreach is just one part of Harris’ overall path to Election Day, but now, with no bigger names left on the table for support, the vice president will likely find out if there’s more support to be had from dissatisfied Republicans — or if she’s already maxed out.

My own analysis borrows a couple of terms from economics: micro and macro.

My “micro” level analysis is necessarily limited– circumscribed by the people I personally know. Most of the Republicans I worked with back when I was a Republican are appalled by what the party has become. Those I know and still interact with loathe Trump, and are forthright in saying they intend to vote for Harris. Several have completely abandoned the GOP. Rather obviously, the new endorsements won’t affect them.

More significantly, they aren’t representative of the millions of people who voted for Trump in 2020.

That means that the “macro” question is the all-important one: how many Americans are MAGA partisans who will go to the polls and enthusiastically vote for a neo-fascist movement headed by a mentally-ill (and increasingly senile) would-be autocrat? How large is the cult that comprises his base–and (given the Electoral College) where do they live?

There are two aspects to that “macro” question: 1) how many people have actually “drunk the Kool-Aid” versus the rest of us? and (actually more consequential)–2) how many members of each of these incommensurate groups will show up to vote?

All of this ignores the weirdest question of all: how many previously politically-unengaged “Swifties” will vote thanks to Taylor Swift’s endorsement?

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War and Peace and Chickenhawks

I rarely write about foreign affairs, because it is a complex policy arena in which I have little or no expertise, but the current right-wing hysteria over the (not-yet-fully-fleshed-out) deal with Iran is incredibly troubling for a number of reasons.

Part of the push-back, of course, can be attributed to the Right’s pathological hatred of Obama. But a lot of it goes well beyond that and into the psyches of the GOP’s “Cheney wing”–those saber-rattling lawmakers who enjoyed multiple deferments or otherwise avoided military service themselves, but who sneer at diplomacy and seem bound and determined to send other people’s children into combat.

That “ready, shoot, aim” approach cost us dearly in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention that it decimated and destabilized large portions of an already volatile region. You’d think we might have learned a lesson…

Of course, American Right-wingers aren’t the only paranoids participating in the debate. Netanyahu (Israel’s Dick Cheney) isn’t helping matters. To the contrary, he is inflicting significant damage on the American-Israeli partnership that is critical to Israel’s continued survival.

As Political Animal reports

As Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu continues to decry the landmark deal between the U.S. and Iran, more evidence is emerging that Israel’s current leadership is alienating Americans in droves:

The number of Americans who view Israel as an ally of the United States has sharply decreased, according to a new poll published Thursday. Only 54% of Americans polled said that Israel is their country’s ally, a decline from 68% in 2014 and 74% in 2012.

It isn’t just non-Jews who find Netanyahu’s positions counter-productive and ultimately dangerous to the Jewish state. J Street, a Jewish, pro-Israel lobbying group, is alarmed by his rhetoric, as are numerous Israelis in and out of that country’s defense forces. His unseemly and partisan alliance with Congressional Republican hawks is nothing new, nor is his track record of being wrong about pretty much everything.  His narrow re-election  has made rational debate much more difficult.

Early indications are that the deal struck by Kerry is better than most experts had hoped for. That doesn’t mean it should be uncritically endorsed; the details to be worked out are important, and the stakes are too high for an agreement based only upon “trust me.” That said, the current status is promising, and neither Bibi’s longstanding paranoid fantasies nor the wet dreams of American chickenhawks should derail continuing work on a comprehensive agreement.

As they said in the 60s, all we are asking is to give peace a chance.

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If Dick Cheney Were Capable of Shame….

Darth Cheney has emerged again from whatever hole he occupies, to proclaim the attack on the U.S. Embassy in Bengazi “the worst disaster” he can recall, and to assert that it is evidence of the incompetence of the Obama Administration.

Leaving aside the fact that the Republicans in Congress engineered significant cuts to the budget for embassy security, despite warnings that the cuts would endanger American lives, it is hard to believe the chutzpah of a Bush Administration VP (“vice” in every sense of the word). This was the administration that ignored “Bin Laden Determined to Attack in U.S.” and saw the destruction of the Twin Towers.

This was also the administration in power when we sustained fifty plus attacks on U.S. diplomatic facilities abroad, thirteen of which were lethal. (And that’s excluding those in Baghdad). Those attacks in which American diplomats lost their lives occurred during Cheney’s “rein,” and before Barack Obama ever stepped into the Oval Office: Jan. 22, 2002, Calcutta, India; June 14, 2002, Karachi, Pakistan; Oct. 12, 2002, Denpasar, Bali; Feb. 28, 2003, Islamabad, Pakistan; May 12, 2003, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia,July 30, 2004, Tashkent, Uzbekistan; Dec. 6, 2004, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia; March 2, 2006, Karachi, Pakistan; Sept. 12, 2006, Damascus, Syria; Jan. 12, 2007, Athens, Greece; March 18, 2008, Sana’a, Yemen; July 9, 2008, Istanbul, Turkey; Sept. 17, 2008, Sana’a, Yemen.

I don’t recall Democrats conducting endless investigations and calling for impeachments as a result of those attacks.

If there was ever any doubt that Dick Cheney is a small, twisted, evil man, his willingness to use baldfaced lies in the service of partisan politics, and his eagerness to use the deaths of American diplomats to score cheap points would erase it.

But really, was there any doubt?

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