On Nov. 4, Mark Crispin Miller, the New York University media studies professor and longtime Bush critic, appeared on the lefty radio show “Democracy Now!” to promote his new book, “Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election and Why They’ll Steal the Next One Too (Unless We Stop Them).” As part of an on-air debate with the investigative reporter Mark Hertsgaard, who recently criticized Miller’s book in Mother Jones magazine, Miller let slip a dramatic piece of news about last year’s Democratic nominee for the presidency. “On Friday, this last Friday night, I arranged to meet Senator Kerry at a fundraiser to give him a copy of my book,” Miller said. “He told me he now thinks the election was stolen.”
Now, this was big news. If what Miller said about Kerry was right, it would have signaled a momentous shift in thinking for the senator. For a year now, partisans on the left who say that Bush stole last year’s presidential race have had a hard time making their claim stick precisely because Kerry, the man they allege was the main victim of the fraud, had so quickly conceded the election and so thoroughly ignored any suggestion that it had been rigged. But if Kerry now thought that these people were right — if Kerry now believed Bush didn’t actually win the race — well, that would change everything. Suddenly the year-long online barrage of half-baked theories and misreported election data that some people say proves a massive, successful Republican conspiracy to install Bush in the White House would have found a very prominent, aggrieved backer, someone to finally make the case to the world that Americans had been cheated of their rightful president.
Unfortunately for the partisans, Miller’s Kerry blockbuster quickly fizzled. “I know Mr. Miller is trying to sell his book and he feels passionately about his thesis, but his recent statements about his conversation with Senator Kerry are simply not true,” Jenny Backus, a Kerry spokeswoman, told Raw Story shortly after the “Democracy Now!” broadcast. “The only thing true about his recollection of the conversation is that he gave Senator Kerry a copy of his book.”
Of course, I don’t know what transpired between the professor and the senator, but Miller’s shaky scoop is all too typical of much of the reporting in his book, in which Miller claims to prove that “hundreds, even thousands” of people on the right, spread across the country, conspired to steal the 2004 presidential election (and many others besides).
I say that Miller claims to prove this because that’s pretty much all he does. In his introduction, Miller promises to prove that Republicans rigged the race, and then at some point in the middle of the book he begins talking like he already has, and the reader is left to leaf through the volume in a daze, wondering if perhaps some kind of typesetting or bookbinding error caused the explosive section of Miller’s tome to be left out of this one copy. But not so; my book is intact, and though I searched the contents, the index and the voluminous endnotes, I found no proof of Miller’s theory. Like his claim that Kerry now believes he was robbed, Miller’s many suggestions of fraud dissolve under close scrutiny. By the end, the only fraud you’re sure of is the one perpetrated upon you, the reader, into bearing with this book.
In an ideal world, one wouldn’t feel compelled to review — nor to say much of anything about — a book like “Fooled Again.” In an ideal world, books like these — vacuous, tendentious collections of pseudo-journalism that promise 10 times as much in their titles as they deliver between the covers — would die quietly off in the media distance, ignored by everyone, inciting nobody, collecting dust and a heap of embarrassment for their overheated authors.
But if I sound somewhat exercised about “Fooled Again” it’s because I know we don’t live in that world in which bad books are guaranteed to fall from our collective radar — god knows that’s not how things work around here. Instead, in this world, the world of Free Republic and Democratic Underground, half-truths and partisan theories rattle about endlessly over e-mail and blogs until they achieve a sheen of truth, however insubstantial they may be. Miller’s book is already getting much play: Aside from a national book tour, he’s making the rounds on shows like “Democracy Now!” (which, to its credit, also invited a skeptic of Miller’s theories), and in August, Harper’s magazine published a lengthy excerpt from “Fooled Again” (and, depressingly and unsurprisingly, did not question Miller’s assertions).
Thus, “Fooled Again” probably isn’t going to go away. This is not good news for anyone who cares about the sanctity of American elections. The fact is that the machinery of American democracy is broken; mistakes, inaccuracies, chicaneries, snafus, frauds, fiascoes and disasters debilitate almost every race everywhere every two years, with the result that increasing numbers of Americans report feeling alienated by the voting process. It’s no exaggeration to say the problem has reached the level of a national emergency.
But by putting forth exaggerated and easily disputable theories of election theft, “Fooled Again” undermines the entire reform endeavor, tying the legitimate need to fix things to the less laudable, fringe-left goal of mercilessly bashing Bush. If you want to improve how Americans vote, here’s one piece of advice: Don’t alienate half the country by arguing, as Miller does here, that the president and his followers — whom Miller labels “Busheviks” — think of their political enemies as “subhuman beings,” and believe they must “slaughter” their opponents in the same way that religious fanatics slaughter their holy foes. Even if you believe this to be true, and even if it is in fact true, shut up about it; this sort of unhinged rhetoric can’t help, and can only hurt, our capacity to solve the problem of voting in America.
In the year since the election, Miller has done little of his own investigation into the facts surrounding the race. Though he has conducted some interviews as part of his research, much of his book is the product of his obvious facility with the Web: To make his case, Miller cites hundreds of news accounts, online reports and videos, and postings from sites like Democratic Underground (he includes a couple of my own pre-election Salon reports warning of Republican malfeasance). Not all of the documents he cites have much to do with the election itself, mind you. In addition to attempting to show that Republicans stole the election, Miller also tries to psychologically profile conservatives, to deconstruct the mind-set that he says prompts people on the right to play politics unfairly. To that end, Miller threads his account with several long, insufferable and ultimately meaningless story lines that have nothing to do with the election itself — for instance, a wending account of the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings.
When he does focus on the election, Miller is catholic in his suspicions; he offers a bevy of reports alleging wrongdoing across the nation, from California to the New York island, and he seems to accept each one pretty much uncritically. Like the rest of us, though, Miller has one special state he’s most concerned about: Ohio, the decisive electoral state, and one where he says problems were legion.
You can see from Miller’s endnotes that many of his Ohio allegations come from a single source, a report called “Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio,” which was published in January by the Democratic staff of the House Judiciary Committee under the direction of Michigan Rep. John Conyers. (A PDF version of the report is available here.) The Conyers report is in turn also largely inspired by a single source — the Free Press, a muckraking lefty Web site based in Columbus, whose editor Bob Fitrakis reported on a series of alleged electoral mishaps in the aftermath of last year’s race.
Because both Miller and Conyers were meticulous in their sourcing, it’s not hard to drill down into many of their allegations to unearth problems with their claims. For instance, look at this eyebrow-raising statement Miller makes about Miami County, Ohio: “[I]n Miami County, nearly 19,000 votes appeared in Bush’s column after all precincts had reported” — the sort of declaration sure to cause any good liberal to feel that we’ve been duped.
But when you look at Conyers’ report, from which Miller draws this Miami County claim, his allegation loses some of its clout. First, it becomes clear that Miller has misread a key detail. It turns out that although Conyers did assert that 19,000 votes were added in Miami County after all precincts had reported their totals, he did not say that they were all added to Bush’s total. As the report points out, Bush’s vote count jumped from 20,807 to 33,039 after the polls closed that’s 12,000 more votes in his column, not 19,000. The rest went to Kerry (and to other candidates).
But 12,000 more votes for Bush is still a lot of added votes! you might point out. The thing is, that claim, too, soon falls apart. When you look at the source of Conyers’ assertion, an article by Fitrakis in the Free Press, it becomes clear that those 12,000 votes weren’t added after the polls closed, but instead were in the system before, and had just not been reported when Fitrakis first looked at the county’s reporting Web site. “The report you saw the following morning at 9 a.m. was probably either the 60 or 80 percent report,” Roger Kearney, of Rhombus Technologies, the company in charge of reporting vote totals for the county, told Fitrakis. Mark Hertsgaard further clarifies the situation in his piece in Mother Jones. “The problem is that Miami County considers a precinct to be ‘reporting’ as soon as a single vote is reported,” Hertsgaard writes. “Thus, when Kearney was posting results on election night, both his next-to-last and his last post of the night said that 100 percent of precincts were reporting,” even though all of the votes weren’t in yet. So Fitrakis, and then Conyers, and then Miller, misread the situation — and spun an entire theory of electoral fraud from it.
Hertsgaard’s article offers a nice compendium of fraud claims that the author buys into too easily. For instance, Miller says that an FBI lockdown in Warren County caused officials there to kick out the press and “tally up the votes in secret.” Actually, two Republicans and two Democratic officials witnessed the vote count, and the press was barred because it’s always been barred, Warren County officials told Hertsgaard. Then there are the allegations involving Triad, a voting equipment company that Fitrakis, Conyers and ultimately Miller say attempted to reprogram the voting machines it supplied to several counties during a statewide recount held after the November election. Triad’s manipulation, Miller says, invalidated the recount, and therefore invalidated Ohio’s election.
But when Hertsgaard talked to Conyers’ star witness in the case, a Democratic election official in Hocking County who claimed to have witnessed a Triad employee try to rig a voting machine, he found her story “more nuanced” than Miller and Conyers let on. The woman, Sharon Eaton, said she was suspicious of the circumstances, but that “I still don’t know if there was fraud.” And Triad’s CEO insisted to Hertsgaard that Triad reran vote-counting exercises for county officials to prove that everything was on the up-and-up.
In several instances, Miller goes far beyond even what the Conyers report was willing to allege. Where Conyers merely spotted problems and reported them, Miller looks at every problem and sees it as further proof of a grand conspiracy.
For example, Conyers’ report — citing several articles in local and national newspapers — suggests that the most pernicious problem in Ohio on Election Day had to do with the unequal distribution of voting machines between wealthy, suburban areas and poorer, urban areas. These allegations are easy to substantiate. In the weeks prior to the election, voter registration lists surged in traditionally Democratic areas across the state, but officials in those areas did not increase the number of voting machines accordingly. Officials in Franklin County, home of Columbus, admitted to the Washington Post last December that their studies showed they would have needed more than 5,000 machines to handle the load there — but they made do with the 2,866 machines they had on hand, they said, because it didn’t make sense to buy more machines for a single election.
There’s no question that such skimping caused disenfranchisement — the voting lines swelled, and on that rainy November day, many people decided to go home rather than wait to vote. As part of a report released by the Democratic National Committee in June, Walter Mebane, a political scientist at Cornell, estimated that the long lines reduced statewide voter turnout by “roughly 2 to 3 percent.”
But if it’s clear that there weren’t enough machines for many people to vote on, it’s not obvious that, as Miller asserts, “such imbalance was deliberate, and not your typical Election Day snafu.” How does Miller know this? Conyers’ report doesn’t suggest that the unequal distribution of voting machines was a deliberate plan cooked up by Republicans. Neither did the DNC say so in its investigation of Ohio’s election. And, in fact, in Ohio, voting-machine allocation decisions are made by people at the county level, and in several key counties Democrats played an important part in those decisions. Matt Damschroeder, Franklin County’s director of elections, is a Republican; but the entire elections board is equally split between Republicans and Democrats, and the chairman of the board is an African-American named William Anthony who also headed the county’s Democratic Party. Any effort to deliberately skew the vote toward Bush would have had to involve Anthony — and he fiercely rejects the charge that he’d do such a thing. “I am a black man. Why would I sit there and disenfranchise voters in my own community?” Anthony told the Columbus Dispatch in November. “I’ve fought my whole life for people’s right to vote.”
When confronted on “Democracy Now!” with holes in his theory, Miller said that he was pained by his critics’ “pedantic over-analysis of specific claims.” He added: “This is not a criminal case, OK? We don’t have to prove guilt beyond a shadow of a doubt. This is our election system, right? This is a system based on consent of the governed. If many, many millions of Americans are convinced that they got screwed on Election Day and couldn’t vote, or if 3.4 million more Americans claim that they voted than the actual total of voters — this is what the Census Bureau told us last May — this is grounds alone for serious investigation … We have to have serious investigation.”
Miller is right. The electoral system is not a criminal case, and you don’t have to prove that Bush stole the election beyond a shadow of a doubt in order to eradicate all doubts you may have about the race. And he’s right, too, that we should have had a serious investigation into the flaws in the last election, and that those flaws — and the flaws we see every year — should prompt politicians to fix the entire electoral system before the next big race.
But “Fooled Again” is not that serious investigation. It’s nowhere close. Miller writes that “it is the purpose of this book to serve American democracy by pointing out the truth about the last election, for that truth alone, and not the maunderings of the punditocracy, will set us free.” But this is where Miller fails his audience. In his reliance on a lower measure of proof, something less than “beyond a shadow of a doubt,” Miller strays far, too far, from the truth. And if we’re not willing to look at the election honestly, we won’t be set free anytime soon.
Barack Obama’s presidency was born from nothing so much as his repudiation of George W. Bush’s administration — its policies and politics, its style and tone. One of Obama’s most effective 2008 stump speech refrains was his promise to end the era of “Scooter Libby justice, ‘Brownie’ incompetence and Karl Rove politics.”
But the political dynamics for winning a second presidential term often differ markedly from winning the first. So don’t be surprised by many eerie parallels between Obama’s 2012 reelection bid and Bush’s 2004 campaign. The president may not rely upon “Karl Rove politics” in the strictest sense, and nobody would confuse David Axelrod with Rove. But Obama’s reelection route and rhetoric may bear more than a few Rovian hallmarks.
Now that Mitt Romney has won the Republican nomination, two key features prevail over the 2012 campaign — and both were also plainly evident in 2004. First, the incumbent president’s reelection fortunes are far from certain; and, second, the incumbent faces a decent but nevertheless weak challenger who is further hampered by internal problems within his party’s coalition.
Because incumbents can’t run for reelection promising “change,” and because “hope” during a lingering recession was also off the menu, the Obama campaign’s 2012 theme of “forward” — a word that often follows “plow,” mind you — was the best available alternative. That said, and substituting the economy for terrorism, Obama is implicitly if not explicitly advancing the same theme Bush did in 2004: America suffered a tough blow, but the situation could have been worse and, more to the point, under my stewardship the nation is steadily regaining its footing.
This counterfactual campaign theme — vote for me not because of what happened, but what might have but didn’t — is a common thread for Bush and Obama. It’s not an uplifting message, but it sufficed in 2004 and Obama is counting on it working again in 2012.
Politics 101 further dictates that when an incumbent’s reelection is in doubt, he must go negative against the challenger. Obama political operatives in the White House and at the Democratic National Committee long ago made it abundantly clear they were willing to do just that. Team Obama may not go negative against Romney to the degree the Bush camp did against John Kerry in 2004. (By mid-summer 2004, 75 percent of Bush’s TV ads were negative attacks on Kerry.) But don’t be surprised if attacks on Romney’s record and even character are plentiful, harsh and relentless. In 2008, America saw candidate Obama’s toothy grin; four years later, expect to see President Obama’s fangs.
Expect the Obama camp to emphasize two major critiques of Romney: that he is a flip-flopper willing to say anything or reverse any position to win; and that he is an economic royalist whose personal and public life suggest a person incapable of understanding the lives and struggles of average Americans. Again — note the unusual parallels with 2004.
Although Romney is a Republican former governor and Kerry was at the time his state’s Democratic junior U.S. senator, the two Massachusetts pols make for similar targets. Each man is an extraordinarily rich preppie and Ivy Leaguer. Each represents the liberal wing of his respective party. Each has shown a propensity for ruining an otherwise valid point with sloppy, backfiring language. And each has a reputation for lacking political spine.
The flip-flop frame is candidate character assassination of the first order. Like the lone negative number in a string of multiplied positives, the critique that nobody can trust any statement or claim made by a politician has the potential to negate every accomplishment or promise. If it sticks, it can be fatal, as Kerry learned in 2004.
Obama and the Democratic National Committee know their electoral history and, sure enough, last November — a year before the election and two full months before a single Iowan had caucused — the DNC released a four-minute “Mitt vs. Mitt” ad and its accompanying website with the damning tag line, “the story of two men trapped in one body.” The site is a brilliant homage to the Bush campaign’s 2004 windsurfer attack ad and the devastating, 11-minute ad the Republican National Committee produced chronicling Kerry’s “evolution” on Iraq.
And then there is what might be called “the Willard factor”: Romney as Richy Rich, the Monopoly Guy with the Bain Capital background and the Swiss bank account. His bio would be political gold to Romney’s opponent any election cycle, but it’s gold-plated platinum in the first full presidential campaign following the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression, the rise of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and the long overdue national debate over income inequality.
Again, the wealth-personified line of attack mirrors the out-of-touch, Martha’s Vineyard yoke the Bush team put around Kerry’s neck in 2004. Right on cue, in the first public event of his reelection campaign, last week Obama attacked Romney by name and invoked the economic disconnect card with relish. “He sincerely believes that if CEOs and wealthy investors like him make money the rest of us will automatically prosper as well,” said Obama of Romney, adding that “corporations aren’t people – -people are people.” (For the record, Kerry is actually wealthier than Romney, who would become one of the richest men ever to occupy the White House, should he win.)
Obama will also try to shift the national debate toward areas of strength, as Bush did. Historically, this meant the same strategy, but with inverse implications for each party: The so-called mommy party Democrats would encourage voters to focus on more favorable kitchen-table economy issues — healthcare, jobs, education — and away from less favorable “daddy party” Republican issues surrounding foreign wars abroad and culture wars. Because Obama is net-positive in foreign policy approval and net-negative on the economy, rather than mirroring by inversion, Obama will try to duplicate Bush’s shift-in-emphasis in 2004. GOP complaints that Obama is politicizing the killing of Osama bin Laden reveal Republican fears that Obama is going to play the terrorism card in 2012 just like Bush did eight years ago.
The 2004 parallels extend beyond message. Obama will be amply resourced and enjoy a field technology by virtue of his campaign’s state-of-the-art Web, donor, volunteer and social media innovations. Remember the Bush reelection campaign’s vaunted “72-hour” voter turnout model? That seems like an Edsel compared to the Ferrari the Obama team will be sporting this summer and fall. Among the perquisites modern presidential incumbents enjoy is the option to test-drive the best mobilization machines before anyone else.
Finally, what most connects Obama 2012 to Bush 2004 is the stability of the electoral map itself. Only three states — two net to Bush — flipped from one party to the other between 2000 and 2004; only nine states flipped between 2004 and 2008. Split the difference and a good, back-of-the-napkin over-under for number of states likely to flip between 2008 and 2012 is six. And thus, like the lead sailboat during a windless race, Obama doesn’t need or want conditions to change much from 2008: He merely has to replicate the map that swept him into office, with the burden of figuring out how to shake up the Electoral College falling to Romney, just as it did for Kerry against Bush. Even Karl Rove’s mapping of the 2012 election concedes this reality.
The 2008 election was memorable; to borrow the title of one best-selling chronicle, it was a “game changer.” But 2012 will not be. In many respects, it will be a game repeater, with Obama playing Bush to Romney’s Kerry of 2004. The president may be asking Americans to look “forward” in 2012, but the best preview of his reelection campaign can be found by looking backward eight years.
There was good reason for Republicans to cry foul over the Obama campaign’s advertisement highlighting the president’s killing of Osama bin Laden; the GOP has lost its decades-long edge on national security. According to a Washington Post poll, “By a margin of more than 2 to 1, Americans say the president’s handling of terrorism is a major reason to support rather than oppose his bid for reelection.”
Republicans lost their popularity on security issues for one reason: George W. Bush’s foreign policy was a disaster. And yet, the party’s nominee, Mitt Romney, has assembled a foreign-policy team composed almost exclusively of individuals with the same war-always mentality and ideology that served Bush — and the United States — so poorly. In some cases, the exact same men responsible for Bush’s catastrophic national security policies are advising Romney. The former Massachusetts governor could have included some of the pragmatists and realists from the George H.W. Bush administration. Instead, a Romney presidency seems like it would be Bush 43 all over again.
Richard Grenell, who served as United Nations spokesman under Bush, may be gone from the Romney campaign after an uproar over his sexuality, but there are plenty more former Bushies. First off, there are Romney’s “special advisors.” There’s Michael Chertoff, W.’s Homeland Security director. Chertoff oversaw DHS’s failures during Hurricane Katrina, and amassed unprecedented powers of secrecy. Next up is Eliot Cohen, counselor to the State Department for Bush’s last two years and on the Defense Policy Advisory Board for the president’s entire term. Cohen was an adamant supporter of the Iraq War and advised Bush directly on the issue. Or take Cofer Black, the man who infamously said to Bush in September 2011 about al-Qaida that “When we’re through with them they will have flies walking across their eyeballs.” Black went on to become chairman of Blackwater, where he resigned after the company illegally bribed Iraqi officials.
Then there are the 13 “working groups” composed of equally worrisome individuals. The Middle East and North Africa Working Group is co-chaired by Bush’s Assistant Secretary of Defense Mary Beth Long, and Meghan O’Sullivan, Bush’s special assistant and deputy national security advisor for Iraq and Afghanistan. The remaining co-chair is Walid Phares, who never worked for Bush but advised Lebanese warlords in the 1980s. Romney has reportedly promised Phares a top job in his administration, despite his virulently anti-Islamic views.
All told, Romney lists 37 holdovers from the George W. Bush administration — the very same administration he and all other Republican candidates barely referenced during their many debates because it was so discredited and toxic, even to the Republican base.
It didn’t have to be this way. There are, in fact, people in Republican circles who are sensible on international affairs. The Cato Institute, in particular, has experts that could dramatically change the direction of American foreign policy. Men like Justin Logan and Christopher Preble were prescient on Iraq and a host of other issues. Similarly, the Center for the National Interest (formerly the Nixon Center) has a host of solid scholars, including ones like Dimitri Simes and Geoffrey Kemp, who have valuable government experience in the Nixon and Reagan administrations, respectively, and a history of perceptive analysis. Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, would have been another good pick.
So why aren’t guys like this being tapped? Why is the GOP sticking with a discredited foreign-policy approach rather that looking to its own past for wiser counsel? “Most of the realists and pragmatists have simply been driven out of the Republican Party,” says Stephen Walt, who writes a blog at Foreign Policy and teaches at Harvard. “The neoconservatives have been driving the agenda since Bush was elected and they remain well-entrenched.”
Another factor is that the Republican Party’s base remains strongly militaristic and reluctant to recognize limits on American power. Jon Huntsman’s failed presidential campaign illustrated that problem. The good news is that nobody seems to be calling for nation-building and occupying foreign countries in the mold of Iraq and Afghanistan. But that’s the only lesson that seems to have been learned from the last decade of foreign-policy debacles.
Finally, it may just be that the United States has too much power to change course. While the Unites States has undoubtedly made disastrous decisions in the last decades, it is so powerful that it is largely insulated from the consequences of them. If Romney’s foreign-policy advisor list is anything to go by, a Romney administration would have to teach the U.S. all over again about the problems with trying to police the world. Prepare for Bush redux.
The Bush administration hasn’t heard the last from Philip Zelikow. After the rediscovery last week of his long lost 2006 anti-torture memo, Zelikow, a former State Department official, has written arguably the most damning article yet about U.S. government’s interrogation policies from 2001 to 2009. The article, called “Codes of Conduct for a Twilight War,” will be released in a forthcoming issue of the Houston Law Journal, and was obtained exclusively by Salon. Says Zelikow in an email: “I’m not aware of other accounts that combine historical, policy and legal approaches to” the subject of the Bush administration’s interrogation methods.
Based on published histories and his firsthand observations, and adapted from a lecture delivered in November, the article calls the administration’s rationale for its use of torture — which he nonetheless insists only on calling “extreme interrogation” and “coercive methods” — “radical,” “an amazing contention,” “untenable and extreme,” “unsustainable,” “an unprecedented program of coolly calculated dehumanizing abuse and physical torment,” and, finally, simply a “mistake.” He concludes: “This was a collective failure of American public leadership, in which a number of officials and members of Congress (and staffers) of both parties played a part, endorsing a CIA program of physical coercion without any precedent in U.S. history.” In fact, “The only defense against criminal prosecution would be that officials acted in good faith reliance on the advice of their government lawyers.”
Part of what makes Zelikow’s analysis so damning and definitive is its judiciousness. The article is deeply empathetic of the uniquely fearful situation under which the Bush administration was initially operating. Zelikow calls the Sept. 11 attacks a “collective trauma” and a “shoc[k] to mass beliefs.” He notes that Bush and others spent time in burn units, morgues and with survivors of the attacks. One traumatic experienced often overlooked — overlooked because it appeared in Stephen Hayes’ stenographic biography of Dick Cheney — was that the vice-president’s daughter was (falsely, it turns out) told that her house with her children in it had tested positive for anthrax. Similarly, Cheney and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice were told that they and others had been exposed to an extremely lethal toxin in a particular area of the White House — and might soon die as a result. “The alarms did not stop and they too were not abstract … The pressure on Bush and his senior advisers was so direct because so much of the response had to be invented and improvised,” the article reads.
An additional factor in the power of the article is Zelikow’s credibility and history. Before entering government, he was a civil rights lawyer in Texas battling the Ku Klux Klan and then a highly esteemed Harvard historian specializing in U.S. foreign policy — he co-authored one book with Rice. He then served on the National Security Council under President George H.W. Bush and directed the 9/11 Commission before becoming counselor to Rice at the State Department from 2005 to 2007. He currently volunteers part-time on the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board under President Obama.
Such bipartisan, establishment credentials render the breakdown and conclusion of this article all the more damning. He believes that what should have been a political and moral question — should the United States torture captives? — became strictly a legal matter left up to government lawyers, few of whom had any experience with these issues, and who had to take the necessity of extreme measures as a given. “These lawyers then became secular priests, granting absolution to the supplicant policymakers,” Zelikow writes.
The problems began when the Office of the Vice President and the CIA took central roles in policymaking. Cheney felt himself above the rest of the National Security Council, bypassing Rice and other traditional channels of national security policymaking. Ad-hoc decision-making and improvisation became “a habit of thought,” which seemed initially to pay off in the security of the nation, as well as in Bush’s political standing and self-confidence.
With Cheney and CIA head George Tenet “the key entrepreneurs in setting codes of conduct for the War on Terror,” it was essentially left to their obsequious lawyers to decide, in secret, on the interrogation methods America should employ. Bush even told the Senate’s Intelligence Committee chairman that “the vice president should be your point of contact … [He] has the portfolio for intelligence activities.” Decisions were made to jettison international treaties. By December 2001, the CIA was already interested in reverse-engineering methods “heretofore used only to treat Americans to resist enemy torture.” When a senior al-Qaida member was captured in March 2002, the prototype for the administration’s torture policies was already developed. “So, for the first time in American history, leaders of the U.S. government carefully devised ways and means to torment enemy captives.”
Zelikow notes that “None of the policy or moral issues connected with these choices appear to have been analyzed in any noticeable way.” Perhaps worst of all, no serious consideration was given to weighing the costs of benefits of the torture program, with reference to relevant historical precedents and/or examinations of the respective French, British and Israeli experiences in dealing with captured terrorists. “Bush and Rice should have insisted on this,” Zelikow writes.
The 52-page article observes the successes of Obama’s counterterrorism policies after repudiating the use of torture. On the basis of the empirical evidence then, “[t]here is no evident correlations between intelligence success and the available of extreme interrogation methods,” no matter what Bush and Cheney claim. Finally, “The program’s costs — which include the high-level effort expended in order to establish, maintain, and defense the program — appear on the evidence so far to have well outweighed any unique value the program might have had as a method of counterterrorism intelligence collection.” This is apart from the damage to America’s international standing and corrosion of its traditional values.
Zelikow concludes his analysis by arguing that, although the Obama administration has the right to wage war and use extralegal methods to defeat al-Qaida, its claim of that authority to defeat “associated forces” is unwarranted. “The U.S. government should publish and explain any overarching policy and legal documents that guide and confine the conduct of deadly operation against its foreign enemies … the executive branch of the U.S. government has a duty to articulate the scope of its warfare to the Congress and the public.” The Bush administration’s unprecedented elevation of torture to national policy may be history, but the job to get U.S. foreign policy in line with its constitutional and moral obligations is far from over.
News of Thomas Kinkade’s death arrived on the same day I received in the mail a vintage teacup on which I had spent a ridiculous amount of money. It has a cottage painted on it. Kinkade, whose work has long exerted a morbid fascination for me (to the concern of all my friends), specialized in cottages. So some part of me understands the appeal, I guess, but, damn: Those paintings make my corneas hurt. And yet, I could barely stop looking at them.
Kinkade was only 54, and his family told the media that he died of “natural causes.” This comes after years of reports of drunken public misbehavior: cursing at people who tried to save him from falling off bar stools, heckling Siegfried & Roy, grabbing a woman’s breasts at a publicity event and, most memorably, urinating on a Winnie the Pooh statue at the Disneyland Hotel while proclaiming, “This one’s for you, Walt!” There were DUI arrests. Also, his manufacturing company declared bankruptcy two years ago, and former franchisees of the once-ubiquitous Thomas Kinkade Signature Galleries won settlements against him for fraud.
That’s quite a fall for a man who frequently spoke of his Christian faith and family values when asked to comment on the mammoth success of his brand in the early 2000s. “When I got saved, God became my art agent,” Kinkade explained in a 2004 video. He went from a childhood in Placerville, Calif. (invariably characterized as “hard-scrabble”) to an apprenticeship selling his work in supermarket parking lots to his apotheosis as the nation’s “most profitable” artist, the Painter of Light™, and multimillionaire. He was profiled in the New Yorker by Susan Orlean.
I first learned about the dark side of the Painter of Light™ — sorry, couldn’t resist that one — when I reviewed “his” novel, “Cape Light,” in 2002. The novel, first in a series, was produced much as his paintings are: by a semi-industrial process in which low-level apprentices embellish a prefab base provided by Kinkade. He wasn’t the only artist to work in this way; he wasn’t even the only novelist. To the best of my knowledge, his novels — heartwarming, fuzzily pious tales of small-town life — have been coming out ever since, one more facet of a lifestyle brand that, at its most ambitious, included an entire Thomas Kinkade-themed housing development.
My review was just a goof intended to amuse Salon’s readers, but after it appeared, I began to receive emails from people who had sunk their life savings in Thomas Kinkade Signature Galleries (essentially, mall and shopping-district outlets for his prints) and been fleeced. I didn’t really understand how the financial architecture of Kinkade’s gallery empire worked, and I sure didn’t share their taste in wall art, but these people struck me as decent and sincere. They’d believed in Thomas Kinkade — not just in the man or the company, but in the ethos supposedly represented by his work, one in which (to quote Kinkade’s introduction to “Cape Light”) “people have the time to savor life’s simple pleasures” and lead “deep, satisfying lives.”
My conversations with these victims made me uneasy. Was there some relationship between the franchisees’ naivete, perhaps even their willful self-delusion, and their terrible taste? Was it hopelessly snobby to wonder that? What about Kinkade himself? He seemed to be at best a hypocrite and at worst a crook. Was there a meaningful connection between his bad conscience and his bad art? German thinkers of the 1930s would have said so, and they had plenty of opportunity to observe bad fascist art up close. Hermann Broch maintained that someone who chooses to make kitsch is “ethically depraved, a criminal willing radical evil.” The novelist Milan Kundera believes kitsch to be the natural expression of totalitarianism. That’s a lot of moral weight to place on a bunch of garish cottage paintings, but Kinkade was always the first to present his work as a form of ideology.
I felt compassion for the ripped-off gallery operators, and at the same time I was aware that quite a few of them had probably also fallen for the similarly sanctimonious, bogus folksiness of George W. Bush, thereby subjecting our nation to one of the worst presidents in its history. Kinkade and Bush struck me as of a piece, probably because they had both borrowed from Ronald Reagan in promising that we could get back to a better way of life that never existed in the first place. In nearly every encounter with the press, Kinkade delivered a diatribe against the art-world “establishment” that had shut him out. They were “elites” touting unfathomable, downer junk to hardworking people who needed uplift instead. Art snobs were the aesthetic counterparts of the so-called liberal elites, a group that surely included me.
At the same time, I must admit that I, too, like a cottage. Granted, I like the stylized, art-deco kind painted on bone china, rather than the insanely detailed and phosphorescently lit specimens in Kinkade’s pictures. And I’m in little danger of equating my new teacup with a Brancusi just because it’s cheerier. Nevertheless, I suspect that my idea of what’s pleasing about a cottage isn’t too different from that of Kinkade’s fans: an aura of harmless coziness, of modest domestic beauty and comfort not too cut off from the past. It’s as if we’re speaking the same word, but in different languages.
I suspect this is why Kinkade’s paintings have exerted their weird, hypnotic effect on me. They are so preposterous (especially the stream-side ones; he really needed to sit down with an architect and go over the basics of drainage), so awful. And yet I can still detect — beneath that cacophony of hollyhocks and cobblestones and snapdragons — the whisper of something intelligible. I’m pretty sure I know why the hordes of Kinkade collectors love his work, even if I don’t like it myself. Kinkade’s paintings are irredeemably false, like all kitsch, but through them you can just barely glimpse the honest desires they seek to exploit, sinking under the dreck.
Kundera defined kitsch as “the absolute denial of shit,” meaning it offers an airbrushed, sterilized, sentimentalized view of the world. From that, it doesn’t necessarily follow that art wallows in shit, but art doesn’t exist for the primary purpose of denying it, either. Kitsch is, first and foremost, a lie; its very existence is founded on bad faith.
Kinkade, like Bush, peddled a falsely simplified image of the world — one without mildew or flooded basements, for one thing — which, no surprise, turned out to be plastered over a whole lot of stinky stuff. The true believers, the ones who bought into these men the most during the 2000s, ended up paying some of the highest prices, from the Kinkade acolytes who invested in his gallery Ponzi scheme to the working-class red-staters who sent off their kids to die in a pointless war. Bad taste, harmless as it may seem, can end up costing you a lot.
Further reading
Los Angeles Times obituary for Thomas Kinkade
Susan Orlean’s 2001 profile of Thomas Kinkade for the New Yorker
A 2006 Los Angeles Times story documenting Kinkade’s business problems
Salon’s Janelle Brown visits Hiddenbrooke, a Kinkade-theme housing development in Northern California
Laura Miller reviews “Cape Light,” a novel by Thomas Kinkade and Katherine Spencer
In February of 2006, Philip Zelikow, counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, authored a memo opposing the Bush administration’s torture practices (though he employed the infamous obfuscation of “enhanced interrogation techniques”). The White House tried to collect and destroy all copies of the memo, but one survived in the State Department’s bowels and was declassified yesterday in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by the National Security Archive.
The memo argues that the Convention Against Torture, and the Constitution’s prohibitions against cruel and unusual punishment, do indeed apply to the CIA’s use of “waterboard[ing], walling, dousing, stress positions, and cramped confinement.” Zelikow further wrote in the memo that “we are unaware of any precedent in World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, or any subsequent conflict for authorized, systematic interrogation practices similar to those in question here, even when the prisoners were presumed to be unlawful combatants.” According to the memo, the techniques are legally prohibited, even if there is a compelling state interest to justify them, since they should be considered cruel and unusual punishment and “shock the conscience.”
Chillingly, the memo notes that “corrective techniques, such as slaps,” may be legally sustained, as might be “[C]ontrol conditions, such as nudity, sleep deprivation, and liquid diets…depending on the circumstances and details of how these techniques are used.” However much distress Zelikow’s memo caused the White House, it was not an ACLU briefing paper.
“I’m pleased the memo is now part of the historical record and available for study,” Zelikow wrote Salon in an email. The White House had determined that the memo — which was not binding since Zelikow’s was a bureaucratic position without legal authority — was too dangerous to exist. “I later heard the memo was not considered appropriate for further discussion and that copies of my memo should be collected and destroyed,” he said in a May 2009 congressional hearing.
At that hearing, before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Administrative Oversight and the Courts, Zelikow said he had “no view on whether former officials should be prosecuted,” a decision he thinks should be left to “institutions.” However, he did call for a thorough inquiry and a public report examining how the U.S. came to employ torture.
Of course, no such inquiry was ever launched. The Obama administration declined to revisit the U.S. employment of torture, with the president saying he didn’t want to “look back.” Zelikow believes this was a mistake. “I still believe an inquiry would be useful, though less so as time passes and more information becomes available, especially after the 9/11 trials conclude, hopefully this year,” he says in an email.
During his congressional testimony, Zelikow declined to say whether Department of Justice lawyers acted improperly or immorally, conceding only that their opinions were “unsound, even unreasonable.” But in a 2007 lecture in Houston, he had no problem saying “the cool, carefully considered, methodical, prolonged, and repeated subjection of captives to physical torment, and the accompanying psychological terror, is immoral.”
The importance of the memo lies in its revelation that there was real, serious debate inside the Bush administration about how to interrogate captured terrorist suspects. The members of the White House declined to enter that debate — indeed, they did their best to squash it. The destruction of Zelikow’s carefully reasoned memo suggests the White House did not want any record of alternative views even existing, lest they be considered reasonable or people get the idea that the torture policies were thought controversial even by members of the administration.
George W. Bush and Barack Obama (Credit: Reuters/Larry Downing) 
(Credit: Reuters/Win McNamee) 
(Credit: Reuters/Jim Young) 
George W. Bush in 2006 (Credit: AP/Ron Edmonds) 
