Expats Against Bush

Flip flopping, Cheney style

Oh, what a difference a decade or so makes:

"[H]ow many additional American casualties is Saddam worth?" Cheney said then in response to a question.

"And the answer is not very damned many. So I think we got it right, both when we decided to expel him from Kuwait, but also when the president made the decision that we'd achieved our objectives and we were not going to go get bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq."
-Dick Cheney, 1992

This should be pretty good grist for the mill come next week's VP debate. Then again Cheney will probably argue that anyone asking him about his past is aiding America's enemies.

Debate 1: Will you watch?

"So, are you watching the debate?", ask my friends.

Ah, that old expat chestnut: whether to struggle on till the wee hours of the morning in a vain effort to stay on top of the latest developments in Campaign Land, or wait until I wake up to get the soundbite version?

I think, unfortunately, it will be the latter. Apparently there's little difference between the candidates' positions, and no way for them to make their arguments effectively even if there were.

Soundbites it is then. Rather, bleary and surreptitious perusal of CNN transcripts over a triple cappucino at work in the morning should suffice. By then the spin machine should be well and truly ramped up as well, saving any of us from having to judge for ourselves. Phew!

Expats: Make sure you are able to vote!

I got this reminder email from OverseasVote2004.Com, which I thought was useful enough to reproduce in its entirety:

Dear Overseas Voter,

It’s time for YOU to check that you are on the electoral rolls.
If you haven't received your ballot, or if you think there may have been a problem with
your voter registration/absentee ballot request, you should act now to verify that you
are on the electoral rolls.

We propose 2 methods for this: one local and one federal. With the unprecedented overseas
voter registration levels, the FVAP resources are stretched thin; therefore, you may
wish to start at the local level when confirming your registration.

1. Contact your local election official. These websites can help you locate the contact information:
http://www.vote-smart.org/voter_county_election_offices.php
or
http://www.fvap.gov/links/statelinks.html

OR

2. Send an email to vote@fvap.ncr.gov requesting confirmation that you are on the rolls.
Include:

* your name
* last U.S. residence address
* birth date
* last 4 digits of your social security number
* and a request for the Federal Write-In Ballot

If any of the following apply, you have even more reason to request the confirmation.
If you,

* are a first time voter
* have never lived in the US
* could not remember your complete address
* did not have any of the identification requested by your state
* are from a “swing state”
* mailed your form prior to the state primary, but did not receive a primary ballot

Act now – there is no time to waste!

The Overseas Vote 2004 Team

The New York Times also weighs in on the trials and tribulations of voting overseas today.

What if the US were like Iraq?

Now that the Kerry campaign has quite rightly brought its fury to bear on the Iraq situation - more specifically Bush's delusional mismanagement of it - Juan Cole confronts Bush's rosy outlook of the situation there by positing what the US would be like if it were in Iraq's shoes right now:

What if the grounds of the White House and the government buildings near the Mall were constantly taking mortar fire? What if almost nobody in the State Department at Foggy Bottom, the White House, or the Pentagon dared venture out of their buildings, and considered it dangerous to go over to Crystal City or Alexandria?

What if all the reporters for all the major television and print media were trapped in five-star hotels in Washington, DC and New York, unable to move more than a few blocks safely, and dependent on stringers to know what was happening in Oklahoma City and St. Louis? What if the only time they ventured into the Midwest was if they could be embedded in Army or National Guard units?

But that's not what Iraq is like, surely. Surely the CIA and all the other gloom merchants are just guessing. In fact, I can't help but wonder when the Iraqis are going to name that square after Bush. (both links courtesy of TPM)

FVAP.org closes for business - at least for some visitors

If any of you expats have been having trouble getting to the official Federal Voter Assistance Program website (you know, the one that helps you get your absentee ballots), blame the Pentagon:

PARIS — Americans abroad, whose votes could be crucial if the Nov. 2 presidential election proves close, are being denied access to a U.S. Department of Defense Web site designed to make it easier for them to cast absentee ballots.

The problem concerns blocks placed on access to the Web site of the Federal Voting Assistance Program, a Defense Department division to help expatriate American voters, including servicemen and women. The site's address is www.fvap.gov.

[...]

Brett Rierson, a Hong Kong-based Democrat who wrote to Leader about the problem, provided The Associated Press with a copy of her e-mail. Rierson says he has tracked complaints from users of at least 27 ISPs in 25 countries who have been denied access to information from the Pentagon-run site.

He fears that U.S. citizens may be unable to vote if they can't download absentee ballot forms from www.fvap.gov or another site, www.overseasvote.com, which he co-founded, or collect the forms in person from an American embassy or consulate.

"It has the potential to disenfranchise anyone who does not live next to a U.S. Embassy," Rierson said in a telephone interview. But he also noted that the Democratic Party has set up the site www.overseasvote2004.com, where even people using blocked ISPs can still register.

The sister of Democratic hopeful Sen. John Kerry said she was "outraged" and accused the Pentagon of "gross bureaucratic negligence and indifference to the rights of American voters."

"That the Pentagon ... has chosen to surrender to unspecified 'hackers' without firing a single shot in defense of American democracy is suspect," Diana Kerry said in a statement.

I wonder if this could be due to any perceived Democratic bias in the expat voting population this year? No, that would be too far into tinfoil hat territory.

It's the Iraq war, stupid.

Finally, Kerry is going for Bush's jugular on the Iraq fiasco:

In his most comprehensive and stinging indictment of the administration, Kerry charged that by nearly every measure, from attacks on U.S. forces to the pace of reconstruction to the training of an Iraqi security force, conditions in Iraq are far worse than the president has acknowledged. Kerry called the November election a choice between staying the course with failed policies and a change in direction that he said is urgently needed to prevent disaster in Iraq.

And in a campaign email, he said:

National security is a central issue in this campaign. We owe it to the American people to have a real debate about the choices President Bush has made and the choices I would make to fight and win the war on terror.

That means we must have a great honest national debate on Iraq. The president claims it is the centerpiece of his war on terror. In fact, Iraq was a profound diversion from that war and the battle against our greatest enemy, Osama bin Laden and the terrorists. Invading Iraq has created a crisis of historic proportions and, if we do not change course, there is the prospect of a war with no end in sight.

Now the GOP has already started counterattacking with the old "flip-flop" argument, but Kerry has got the right idea - there is no effective counter-argument to the central tenet that Bush has mismanaged the Iraq war and its aftermath. The American people know enough to know when they're being spun, and the Bush folks have been spinning so much it's quite literally making people nauseous. Iraq is a weak point if only Kerry and his team can force Bush to confront the fact that Iraq was a mistake.

Why should we vote for them?

The Guardian has a piece today on US expat voting and how it could influence the election. It mentions the frenetic activity going on in both expat camps to get the vote out, with the question of general political leanings of the community examined (though only in passing) - the UK Republicans Abroad claim a fourfold increase in voter registration vs a twofold one for the Dems, but I find that hard to swallow. The writer, who is American, writes:

Why should we vote for them? The Republicans stress their work to secure advantageous tax breaks for Americans living overseas while the Democrats highlight security, suggesting Bush's foreign policy has made the world a more dangerous place for US citizens.

American civilians living overseas feel more exposed now than they did at the time of the last election, but that feeling could cut two ways: either they will feel the president's moves represent the best chance for combating the terrorist threat or they will feel he has squandered the goodwill generated by September 11 with unswerving unilateralism on a number of causes.

But for military personnel, the change since 2000 is stark: with a war in Afghanistan and US casualties in Iraq passing the 1,000 mark, soldiers are understandably less interested in hearing partisan speeches than a workable plan to win the peace and get them home. John Kael Weston founded Donkeys in the Desert - aka the Iraq chapter of Democrats Abroad - and from his current position, in the Sunni triangle, he said most service personnel were frustrated by the focus on Vietnam coming from both campaigns.

"All this talk of Vietnam service (or non-service) is a bit surreal when you hear it from the vantage point of an all too violent Iraq," he said. He was unimpressed with both parties on their record of coming to Iraq and seeing for themselves what is going on, and has invited both John Kerry and John Edwards for tours. Neither has responded.

Well it's hardly surprising, either of them going out there now would divert critical time away from baby-kissing in Ohio and would be seen (rightly) as an election year stunt.

But it's irrefutable that this is still an open race - and we can't even say for sure where we stand. Let me just give you two polls that are currently contradicting each other:

• Pew: Kerry Support Rebounds, Race Again Even
  
• Gallup: Bush Leads Kerry 55% to 42% in Nationwide Gallup Poll
  

The Electoral Vote Predictor seems to support the latter's case (currently Bush: 307 to Kerry: 211 E.V.s), but even they have fessed up to just discovering a potential problem with their prediction data:

Jimmy Breslin of Newsday had a column yesterday that, if true, makes this website irrelevant. Breslin claims that pollsters do not call the 168 million cell phones in the country. Since many younger voters do not have a land line and just a cell phone, they will be hugely underrepresented in all the telephone polls. Since younger voters lean more towards the Democrats than the average voter, the polls may be greatly underestimating Kerry's strength. Between missing all the people who have only a cell phone and no land line and the 5 million overseas voters, the polls maybe missing a very large section of the electorate.

We're around 50 days from the Big One now, and there are plenty of reasons to be nervous (such as the recent Kerry campaign team reshuffle) but I am, as ever, cautiously optimistic. Just wish Kerry would go on the offensive on Iraq a bit more.

Here's a question for all you expats: How would one go about conducting a reliable and statistically sound poll of US expats abroad? Answers on a postcard please...

What if Bush Wins?

Perish the thought.

A panel of 16 writers over at the Washington Monthly chime in on what they think a 2nd Bush term would look like. Check it out.

(shiver)

Back in Action

First off, apologies for the lack of posting recently - I was unexpectedly called out to work onsite at a client's facility for nearly the last 2 weeks and thus I have been totally unable to post or even check news sites. Don't you hate it when work intrudes in more important parts of your life? Add this to the fact that I have just moved house and am temporarily internet-less.... But all that is irrelevant. I am back in the office now and ready to stoke the flames of liberal expat anger once again.

What a couple of weeks to have been out of the action! I leave for a few days and all of a sudden everyone's gone glum... And everyone is up in arms about the forged/genuine Bush National Guard documents. Meanwhile Kerry is creeping back up in the polls and seems to be back up near his previous level in the electoral college.

I just haven't seen as much out of Kerry image-wise as I would have hoped by this point. The undecideds need more reason to vote for him than simply "he's not Bush". Kerry is starting to go on the attack on Bush & Co's mismanagement of Iraq but Kerry needs to define what he would have done differently a little more clearly. We need to keep our eyes on the ball here... less than two months to go.

Of course, if it were up to the rest of the world, it would be pretty clear by now who the next President would be [thanks Sally].

Update

I just wanted to post quickly and apologise for the relative paucity of posts this week - work at the day job has well and truly landed like the proverbial ton of bricks. This week, of all weeks! I was looking forward to some quality RNC-bashing too.

I will be posting a look back over the week this weekend, and a look forward to the final stretch into the election. I am very very concerned about the current state of play in the electoral college, to say the least. But at least we will have gotten both conventions behind us and this time next week we should have a better idea of where we stand.

I won't be able to catch Bush's speech tonight - but I'd rather watch it on a net feed where I can fast-forward if I start to feel ill, anyway.