Memo

To:	The Democratic Party
From:	Paul McLeary
cc:	The Media
Date:	May 2004
Re:	Red Herring Alert

Remember high school English class? If so, you'll recall your teacher rambling on about something called a red herring. They seemed to be everywhere your teacher looked, those herrings, diverting the reader from the story's real issues by using irrelevant characters or plot devices to throw you off the track. Politicians are kind of like that, too, feinting left while going right (like the master of the form, Bill Clinton), or saying they're for progressive change, then handing the election to the other side, a la Ralph Nader.

The current administration, too, loves to play the sleight of hand, keeping us guessing all the way through the story by naming its intrusion into the private lives of Americans the "PATRIOT Act," and passing the "Healthy Forests Initiative," which cuts down forests in order "to prevent forest fires." I guess, just like in Vietnam, you have to destroy the village in order to save it. But that's politics.

Presidential election years are full of these half truths and false leads. But you guys know that. You're the national political tastemakers, after all. Remember a few months ago when you hyped the Valerie Plame leak, and it looked like heads might roll over at 1600 Pennsylvania? (To be fair, an investigation is ongoing). Or when Paul O'Neill's book was all the rage? Or even in late March, when everyone left of the Weekly Standard went nuts for Dick Clarke's book Against All Enemies, which credibly charged the Bush administration with ignoring terrorism warnings in the summer of 2001, then pressured analysts to find evidence of Iraqi involvement? You Democratic leaders and media types ate all of this up for a week or two, then moved on the next issue. I'm curious to know if you'll remember any of this stuff come October.

Despite these issues — and don't doubt that there are plenty more to come, Kerry hasn't even stepped up the plate yet — this year's whopper red herring is turning out to be the 9/11 Commission. Make no mistake, this election is about 9/11. Everything that's come after — the recession, Iraq, Plame, yellowcake, O'Neill, Clarke — it all stems, whether in reality or merely by inference, from that morning. While the commission is doing a necessary job by airing the government's dirty laundry in order to make the country safer, I'm afraid that you Democrats seem to be trying to hitch your wagons to a cart that's already pulled out. 9/11 isn't George Bush's fault. It happened on his watch, but the FBI and CIA had a track record of screwing up for quite a while before W was on the scene. Could Bush have done more in the months leading up to 9/11? Absolutely. Does he deserve some of the blame? You bet. Could he have stopped it? We'll never know.

What we do know, however, is that the occupation of Iraq is in shambles, and April has turned out to be the bloodiest month of the whole sorry mess. So, every day that you guys work yourselves up into a tsunami of righteous indignation, pounding the president on intelligence failures surrounding 9/11, is another day you miss hitting him over his handling of the situation in Iraq, which is the real albatross hanging around his administration's neck.

According to a March 17th poll conducted by the non-partisan Annenberg Public Policy Center, when asked, "Do you approve or disapprove of the way George W. Bush is currently handling the situation in Iraq?" 49 percent of those surveyed answered "no." Similarly, an April Newsweek poll found that 51 percent disapprove of the way the president is handling the situation in Iraq, and the president's approval rating on Iraq has fallen steadily since December, also according to Newsweek, when only 39 percent disapproved of his handling of the war and occupation.

Now, the election isn't going to be decided on poll numbers, no matter how many times you talking heads recite them. But the numbers don't lie, and the public is getting restless as the causality numbers add up. So here is my advice, Democrats and media denizens: Let the commission do its work, take shots at Condi Rice's inept bumbling as National Security Advisor, try and get the administration to open up its trove of documents. But don't get too hung up on it. The American people don't blame Bush for 9/11, but as more Americans die and the cost of staying in Iraq with no real plan mounts, the electorate is sure as hell going to blame him for those failures.

We're at a crucial stage right now. The president is against the ropes and is grasping at cliches by staying relentlessly on-message about "evildoers" and "freedom haters." Now it's your job, as the opposition party and purveyors of information, to go after the tragedy this administration has brought on the country by its own choosing: a war that needn't have been fought, a fundamental failure to plan in any realistic fashion for what to do once we occupied the country, and the lies, distortions, and dare I say, red herrings, the Bush administration served up to the American people in the months leading up to war. If you concentrate on these issues, instead of the 9/11 intelligence failures, perhaps (if you'll allow another high school English analogy) this summer and fall can be Bush's denouement.

Oh, and while you're at it, do you think there's any way you can tell John Kerry that he should probably get around to explaining his own vision for Iraq sometime soon? While Americans are going increasingly disillusioned with Bush's plan (or lack thereof), they're not about to vote for someone who doesn't even pretend to have a strategy.

Thanks, guys.

Paul McLeary is a freelance writer in Brooklyn, New York. He also writes for Salon.com, The New York Observer and Social Policy magazine. We love him despite his adoration of the Yankees. He blogs frequently at: http://theatlas.blogspot.com/.