Winding down: 10 days to go

Despite the frenzy that the candidates themselves feel in the final days of an election, these last two weeks always seem to me to be the quietest. Everyone I meet has already made up their mind and are for the most part tuning out the news and election coverage. Much of the campaigning, and almost all of the reporting, has turned negative anyway, as it aways does this time in the season.

I watched Fox news Wednesday evening, "Special Report" with Brit Hume, which I usually enjoy. I have never seen any egregious examples of bias committed by Fox, other than their polling, which is done by Real Clear Politics and always puts the President ahead by several points. Wednesday evening, though, by my count, Brit Hume and his op-ed contributers, Mort Kondrake, Charles Krauthammer, and Mara Liasson did not make a single positive comment towards the Kerry campaign. Liasson, who I suppose is the "liberal" voice on the panel, coming as she does from NPR, made some attempt to defend Kerry, but it was half-hearted. All I heard was, Kerry is down in every poll; his negative campaigning is failing; Teresa's "real job" comment was outrageously offensive ...

"Special Report" usually ends with a humorus clip from one of the late night programs, either Leno or Letterman. Wednesday night, instead of ending on a light note, Hume showed a clip of Kerry at a rally speaking French with a Haitian immigrant. He and Krauthammer and Kondrake got a good chuckle over that. It was perhaps the most sickeningly biased hour of news and opinion I have ever watched in my life.

There are a couple articles in today's online Washington Post worth reading. The first is Record Numbers Voting Early. The gist of this article is that if, as some say, the election will hinge on voter turnout, the Democrats are already turning out more voters than the Republicans. The article cautions, however, that Republicans are more likely to vote absentee than to vote early, though I'm not sure how the article's authors come by that contention. Early voting is historically in its infancy, so is it really worthwhile at this stage to try to guage how it compares with other types of voting? The real question is, will Republicans vote on election day.

The second article worth reading is No Direct Evidence of Plot to Bomb Around Elections. Back in September, and even before then, the administration had been warning us of an election-related mass-casualty terrorist plot that might be in the offing. The CIA source who originally contributed the lead on that plot has since been discredited, according to this article. Additionally, no other credible information has surfaced that leads to direct, verifiable information that a plot is in the planning, let alone in the offing.

I am not one of those who accuses the President of using the threat of terrorism as a political tool, yet one can easily see how valuable that threat would be to a politician. I often wonder how history will judge our "war" on terrorism. Has the threat been overblown, perhaps not intentionally but out of genuine, if misguided fears? Right now, three years after 9/11, with no more attacks on American soil, it becomes more and more difficult to take the war seriously. To a large extent, as with almost everything in this administration, that we are under constant threat of impending doom must be taken on faith. I remember leading up to the war in Iraq, I buried my own doubts because I trusted the Bush Administration must have good cause to want to invade, reasons they could not disclose, evidence that must be kept secret for security reasons. I put my faith in them that they knew best. In some ways, this whole administration's relation to the American people has been like a parent-child relationship in that when the American people question the administration, the President and his people routinely resort to the age-old tautological dodge of parents the world over: because we say so. How do you know Saddam has WMD? Because we say so. How do you know the invasion was right? Because we say so. I find this all the more ironic because in the nineties, conservatives accused the Clinton administration of playing the role of loving, overindulgent parents to a populace grown weak and lazy with government-distributed wealth. Now the Bush Adminsitration has stepped quite naturally into the role of over-authoritative parent who knows best and keeps the kids in a kind of dependent subjugation.