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Net War Room for Bush vs Kerry Debate
ancice writes "Article by Wired. Seems like Bush and Kerry are going to battle in cyberspace. The Bush Team is going to have a War Room to provide live rebuttals to thousands of conversative blogs. Not much info on Kerry's response though. This seems like a good use of the Information Super Highway. Would be interesting to see how this War Room will affect the election. Will this tactic be successful or will it be information overload? Worse still, will technology be exploited? Tune in on Thursday."
I've been wanting to check out President Bush's site for weeks but have not once managed to connect. Is this a case of a DDOS? Piss-poor capacity planning? Or is access from outside the US being blocked on purpose perhaps?
a world in progress...
"Worse still, will technology be exploited?"
I don't get it. What does ancice mean by this? Am I just being dense?
is that if Ralph Nader tries to go this route, Bush and Kerry will join together in a DOS attack on Nader.
i'm impressed with the alertness the bush team is picking up on ways to use the internet.
00010111 always try everything twice
If they're going to rebut blogs (seems like a waste of time to me), shouldn't the Bush team be rebutting liberals?
(yes, i know, just a lame joke from a liberal who can't read).
This is my Sig, this is my Gun. One is for Slashdot and one is for Fun.
> Would be interesting to see how this War Room will affect the election. Will
> this tactic be successful or will it be information overload?
For the blogosphere to be anything but a wash, civility needs to evolve to enable people with conflicting ideas to actually talk and listen to each other.
Most mainstream political blogs are echo chamber fraternities for like-minded people to impishly vent about the "loonies" on the other side. For all of the stuff being written, there is very little over-the-center discourse. There is, however, lots of censorship, ill-will for stray visitors from the "other side", and groupthink.
Give it a few years - as more people arrive on the scene, a basic sense of civic decency might emerge and make blogging a useful tool for actual debate, instead of a big petri dish for idealistic bigotry.
The Bush Team is going to have a War Room to provide live rebuttals to thousands of conversative blogs.
Something tells me that the Bush team isn't interested in rebutting the arguments of their supporters. Are the rubuttals coming from the conservative blogs, or are they rebuttals of liberal blogs?
I can't imagine this swaying anyone. Holding on to the base maybe, but pimping live rebuttals to thousands of conservative blogs seems kinda masturbatory. I'm far more interested in the "real" live rebuttals that will be happening on stage.
This is the first time W. has debated with a record to defend. It should be interesting.
-dameron
----
DailyHaiku.com, saying more in 17 syllables than Bill O'Reilly says all day.
Cynical, and oh so funny!
--- Often in error; never in doubt!
The Bush team keeps driving the point home that Kerry is a flip-flopper. Besides the obvious point that Bush and Co. twist facts and statements to smear Kerry, the more obvious thing is that the attack isn't logically sound. An ad hominem isn't a persuasive argument.
The fact that some people take the Bush and Co. statements to actually mean something significant is just a sign of how poor our education is in this country.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
It's useful right now - look at how conservative bloggers were able to take down CBS news. No matter what you may think of the story, there's no question the memos were forged, and ineptly at that. This story would not have broken without the bloggers.
There is actually enough controversy between people nominally on the same side in sites like Free Republic (right) and Democratic Underground (left) to create effective debates. As a conservative site, Free Republic contains material of all kinds (from The Nation to National Review), and the conservatives who debate range from libertarians to fundamentalists. Democratic Underground is much smaller and ironically has much less tolerance of opposing views than Free Republic. Both sites will delete blatant trolls within seconds, but someone called Liberal Larry has survived on FR for years. He's civil, so he survives. In contrast, I wrote civil messages on DU which people seemed to enjoy responding to and I was deleted simply because I wasn't a liberal. I don't think that would have happened on FR.
A major reason for the emergence of liberal and conservative enclaves is that liberals and conservatives are pretty darn nasty when put in the same web site together, and as a result very little productive discussion actually occurs. This is unfortunate but true.
It's interesting that Slashdot has developed into essentially a liberal ghetto because intelligent conservative posts are moderated down. I have seen this happen to many of my posts, to the extent that I feel unwelcome. As a result, I don't post nearly as much as I did when the section was originally opened.
D
There are different election strategies at work here. The Bush strategy is to energize the Republican base. His campaign wants to get voters so angry about Kerry or some other issue (e.g. Gay Marriage) that they won't stay home on election night. One of the ways Bush fires up the base by demonizing and mocking Kerry. Blogs may help with that.
Kerry's strategy is partly to sign up new voters (AKA "the ground game") and partly to reach for the center and the undecided voter. Blogs probably won't help as much with either of those approaches.
--- Often in error; never in doubt!
The Bush Team is going to have a War Room to provide live rebuttals to thousands of conversative blogs. Not much info on Kerry's response though.
That's because Kerry's team is more bottom-up than the GOP, which is clearly top-down. Talking points are distributed by the GOP to Rush Limbaugh and other talk show hosts, as well as the blogs. The democrats do this to some extent, but with no where near the uniformity that the GOP does. You'll suddenly hear Rush, Hannity and the President all use the same talking point starting on the same day. Kerry gets some of his talking points from the blogs themselves. It's a known fact that the Kerry campaign reads DailyKos and cherry picks the good material.
Gore's advisers thought he won because he did win. As the Daily Howler points out, the five "instant polls" of viewers after the debate gave Gore the win by an average of 9.6% -- a huge margin, especially considering more Bush supporters were watching.
And that perception did change in the hours and days to come, until finally the American people were browbeaten into believing that Bush had won. But one can't blame GOP press releases and emails. The fault lies squarely on the media, as the Daily Howler has been demonstrating all week.
Whether you think our media has a conservative bias or not, it's indisputable that it let Bush get away with murder after that first debate, refusing to do even basic fact-checking on his blatant errors, and it crucified Gore, mostly by focusing on absurdities and trivia like the color of his suit or his body language. Let's put the blame where blame is due.
The polls held directly after the first debate between Bush and Gore in 2000 had Gore winning, albeit it by a slight margin. But after the right wing spin machine got going with a full head of steam within three days those same polls showed Bush winning them by a wider margin than Gore had, and that's been the "result" ever since. Mechanisms like these, where the campaigns themselves directly distribute talking points and rebuttals directly after the debates were generally exclusively a Republican tool, while the Democratic party simple played ctach up and defense. It's interesting to see that the Bush squad has put together a better plan for distributing their version of the events than Kerry's team has, but it's not surprising. Perhaps they'll throw something together since this news has come out. I'm sure they're will be a recptive audience to it.
Th
That's a good point overall, but this US pres. election will probably see relatively high turnout anyway, don't you think?
include $sig;
1;
I would love to see Bush lurching around the stage like a Radio Shack RC car manned by a 3 year old. Walking into the Podium repeatedly like a broken robot. Buzzing and huming like that Futurama episode w/ Lucy Lui
M ER ICA0100101000101010100100001100****REBOOTBRINGITON SADDAMMNHUSSAINWMDE ADDSLIFE /ROBOT VOICE
BURRHSPUTTERPURRBRUR911911911GODBLESSZZZZINZZGA
WMDWMDWMDWMDPRETZELSPLEASECOK
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
You mean this one? I've never had a problem with it...Sure you're going to the right address?
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
The Bush Team is going to have a War Room to provide live rebuttals to thousands of conversative blogs.
conversative
\Con*ver"sa*tive\ (k[o^]n*v[~e]r"s[.a]*t[i^]v), a. Relating to intercourse with men; social; -- opposed to contemplative.
She chose . . . to endue him with the conversative qualities of youth. --Sir H. Wotton.
Direct away from face when opening.
it's not the blogospehere's fault that there's no middle ground. the bushies have created a campaign (and an administration) that has at every turn justified it's decisions with bad science, poor intelligence and, at times, outright lies.
it's hard to have a civilized debate when the other side just screams at the top it's lungs "i don't care, you're a terrorist".
just because I don't care doesn't mean I don't understand!
The first source I found, who ironically is trying to prove that Nader didn't cost Gore the election, has numbers that state otherwise.
If 40% of Nader voters would have voted for Gore, 20% would have voted for Bush, and 40% wouldn't have voted in a 2-way race, then if Nader had resigned from the Florida ballot Gore would have won the state (and hence the election) by nearly 20,000 votes.
Blogs are proving to provide very good checks and balances. The reader has at his disposal all the tools he needs to verify stats, facts, and accusations. This is why the media is so fearful of the blogosphere... It doesn't allow them to have any kind of bias. Big media is dead.
I think its cool that the candidates recognize the Internet as a battleground. I think the Internet is proving to be a more effective medium for getting out your message than television. Lib or Conservative, nothing wrong with that.
http://rupertzone.net/
[FromTheMorning]
George W. Bush is obviously the Coke candidate, because of (1) his history of cocaine use, and (2) the history of Republican administrations importing cocaine into the US as a means of supporting their favorite terrorist groups.
Maybe you should fix your compulsive need to read every story on the front page. Some of us simply avoid reading stories that we're not interested in. It may seem strange to you, but it's possible, and it works pretty well.
The winner of the debate doesn't exactly have to come that night. For instance, in the Ford/Carter debate, everybody that night thought Gerald Ford had won, but it wasn't until the following days did the press report, and both Ford and the public realize how big a mistake Ford's "There is no Soviet Domination of Eastern Europe" line was. The "winner", as you would have it, was actually Carter - but only the preceding days after the debate told us that.
I think this ties into blogs in that, as one blogger so famously put it, "We can fact check your ass!". The average Joe never really had this power before, we would see something said in the media and have little recourse but to talk about it at the water cooler, but now he can post corrections to bad journalism and candidate's claims for the world to see.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur
This is just blatant astroturfing. Here's the astroturf/shill detection formula:
A sudden increase in pro-whatever [Bush in this case] comments by "new" users or users with "fresh" userid's. (AKA high user id's. Greater than 500,000 in the case of Slashdot; that's when MSFT took notice and sent their shills over here - but I digress).
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
Anyway, it sounded like a good drinking game could be constructed where the players consume a tasty beverage if the candidates break one of more of the rules.
If they're pushing their live rebuttals to the convervative blogs, doesn't that mean that they'll only be going out to the conservative base? I think it would be more effective if they could find a way to get this on one of the mainstream news sites like CNN.
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
I think this would be interesting, but how do you actually rebut a hundred different blogs?
Here's an example of a political blog that makes a lot of noise about political issues. Are these war rooms going to do a bunch of astroturfing, replying to peoples blogs, or are they going to serve as some central reference post that others can refer to?
"You can't fight in here!"
TANSTAAFI: There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free iPod.
Stuff like this speaks to the type of party the GOP really is, and what their supporters are made of.
Like any totalitarian party, that pack of taliban needs this type of effort to keep their minions from seeing something that looks like quantitative thought, to prevent legitimate discussion, and to distract from their platform.
Well, it appears that team Bush is a lot faster off the mark than team Kerry. They have 'responses' up on their site about as fast as they can type in Kerry's statements. It looks like they have a bunch of canned statements that they grab to toss up to the top of the page based on the category of the response, since they've had some repeats. Team Kerry doesn't respond nearly so fast. The timing suggests to me that they're doing more of the work by hand.
This just in: President Bush's advisors debate Kerry's comments so that Bush doesn't have to.
Team Kerry's website seems to be asleep.
Interestingly, Team Bush seems to have taken a breather. Maybe they're having fun watching the debate? No updates for over 5 minutes. Maybe they're busy astroturfing? Don't have any ammo for the past few questions?
And Team Bush is back! New header, but some old blocks. I wonder what database and interface they're using to pull their updates off with?
No, he's just saying the same old lines.
Do the Bushies pay you, or are you a freelance fascist?
Yeah, I must be a freelance facist, that's it.
Can you look me in the eye and post that Kerry isn't full of crap half the time?? Like Kerry taking the president to task for starting the "wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time". Didn't Kerry vote FOR the war??
And then Kerry criticizes Bush because "the troops don't have body armor". Great job Mr. Kerry, didn't you vote against the funding to supply the troops with that armor??
Wake up man, you obviously can't debate this rationally.
You're absolutely right: Bush voters wanted Bush to beat Gore, and because Bush ran and they voted for him, they made that happen.
However, most Nader voters wanted Gore to beat Bush, and by voting for Nader they prevented that from happening. Do you see the difference? Either Bush or Nader could have handed the election to Gore by stepping down in Florida, but (assuming that both candidates wanted their voters' preferences to be realized, and that Nader realized his supporters preferred Gore by a 2:1 ratio) only Nader should have wanted to! Those registered Democrats who voted for Bush weren't throwing their votes away, because they really wanted Bush to win (you're allowed to do that, even as a Democrat). 40% of Nader voters weren't throwing their votes away, because (just as you suggested) they really didn't care which other candidate won. But 20% of Nader voters came incredibly close to costing Bush the election by not using their opportunities to express their preference for him over Gore, and 40% of Nader voters did cost Gore the election by not using their opportunities to express their preference for him over Bush.
Don't think I don't sympathize. I'm in Texas voting for Badanarik this election, and if you live anywhere but Pennsylvania, Florida, Michigan, or Ohio I'd encourage you to join me. If you're stuck in a battleground state, though, you've got an ugly choice to make between casting your vote to send a message and casting it to help decide who wins the election. If the exit polls are to be believed, 60,000 Floridans made the wrong choice four years ago. Hopefully it won't happen again this year - if we want to see a non-Republicrat in the White House, it's only going to happen because we vote for state legislators who will end plurality voting, not because we vote for third party candidates who are polling in the single digits.
I'd say Kerry is as full of crap as any other politician. You mistake my opposition to Bush for an endorsement of Kerry. At the time, I thought that Kerry was an asshole just like Bush for voting to give Bush the power to go to war, when it was obvious that he would use it directly.
As for the funding vote, I can't believe that you can look at me with a straight face and say that you've never heard of funding bills with all kinds of nasty riders on them.
Want to have a rational debate? Or are you just going to rely on the talking points from the RNC?
Heh. damn my eyes. first para should have ended: How dare people not act according to your own notions of the national ideal? They should be forced into national service so that they can be taught! blech.
If this even matters, Bush looks so tiny with that big podium. How adorable.
Man, almost half an hour between updates. Admittedly it is a bit longer. Looks like they should have gone with Team Bush's database approach.
dont feed the troll
Wow it's Joey Knisch, a New York legend.
It's good to know that all Bush supporters are facists, I guess that makes about 55% of the voters in America facists. Very interesting...
I could look you in the eye and tell you that you're full of crap.
Kerry did not vote for the war. There was never any vote for the war. There was a congressional vote to permit the President to use force with the UN in order to get weapons inspectors back into Iraq. You can read Kerry's full speech from the Senate floor here: http://www.independentsforkerry.org/uploads/media/ kerry-iraq.html.
The resolution succeeded, getting weapons inspectors back into Iraq. They never found WMDs, so Bush invaded, without a congressional vote and without UN authorization--a violation of the US consitution and the UN charter.
There were two votes, as you know, on the $87billion "body armor" vote. The first, which Kerry voted FOR, would have repealed those portions of the $1.3trillion tax cut that went to the richest Americans, so that the $87billion could actually be paid. Kerry voted FOR that. Congressional Republicans voted AGAINST that. The President threatened that he would VETO such a bill. Who's playing politics? The President would have vetoed a bill to actually pay for that equipment if it resulted in his cronies losing part of that tax cut. The President thinks it is better to borrow money than to actually pay for things. When it was clear that the next version of the $87billion funding bill would pass, since congressional Republicans could pass it themselves, Kerry gave a protest vote against the bill. There was never any chance that our troops would go without supplies as a result of Kerry's voting. Bush was the one who threatened to veto the bill outright if he didn't get his way.
Your 90-second response? :)
I know, I shouldn't keep feeding him. Nah, plenty of Bush supporters are perfectly decent folks. I make my judgement of *you* based on what you posted. In addition to being a fascist, you happen to support Bush. There may be a correlation in your case, but I don't believe that supporting Bush is the cause of being a fascist.
Now that the Debate is over, chat with Bush directly using AIM. he is online using the AIM handle:
DickBush4More
I can't wait to ask him about Iraq and get a coherrent response!
I must have been living in a glass jar or something, but at no time during the 2000 election season did I ever get the perception that Bush won the debates in 2000. Most people I talked with back then -- even W supporters -- thought that Gore won, albeit marginally.
Looking back and reading old CNN news articles, I don't see anything assigning a clear winner. While I'm sure that Fox News spun Bush as the winner, well that is just Fox News. Anybody that watches Fox News has already made up their mind anyways.
Go Here and watch the spin arrive around the country. Just let it update itself every 2 minute or so.
Help fight continental drift.
Very funny. But if that comment is indicative of the quality of spin from the "War Room", Kerry has nothing to worry about.
As of 11:15PM EST...
Kerry sponsored an amendment to the funding bill that would have rolled back the tax cuts by an equal amount, a more responsible move than borrowing the entire amount.
George Bush threatened to veto the bill if it contained any rollback of the tax cuts, as if the $87 billion would just materialize out of thin air.
The Republicans defeated this version. The original version, which was to borrow the entire $87 billion, then passed over Kerry's "no" vote.
Lots of Republicans voted against the first bill and for the second.
So like Kerry, they all cast two opposite votes on this issue.
Unlike him, they voted to pay for the war with a credit card.
That $87billion will have to be paid back someday, with interest. This won't happen before the election, though, so Dubya's not worried about it.
The vote in late 2002 was not an up or down vote to go to war. It was supposed to give authorization to Bush to wage war if all other avenues were exhausted. The timing was right before the midterm elections, while hysteria over 9/11 was still high, and the Republicans could use any no vote as a club to beat opponents down as 'soft on terror'.
Bush was going to war no matter what. He never had any other intention, and fighting a war on terrorism was just an excuse. And in doing this, allowed Bin Laden to escape.
Incredibly, Bush said in the debate tonight that Bin Laden is 'isolated' and apparently, no longer a concern for him. Following 9/11, Bush is on record with his famous "dead or alive" proclamation, but claimed a year later that Bin Laden was 'not a priority'.
But let's not forget that Kerry is a flip-flopper.
I missed about half of the debate d/t work. Anyone have a torrent? NBC preferred (they were showing more split-screeen than the others) but I really don't care...
I want a new world. I think this one is broken.
- Number of trained Iraqi troops. Bush said that there are 100,000 trained Iraqi police/troops, a number I thought to be grossly overstated, and ABC news after the debate said was only 50,000 at most. Kerry himself was talking about how Rumsfeld overstated the number very recently. Kerry could have made big points with this by showing it as an example of how Bush cannot be trusted to tell the objective truth.
- Bush's statement that "Bin Laden is isolated" My jaw dropped at this one, and dropped even further when Kerry let it slide. This should have been a Quayle/Bentsen/"You're no John Kennedy" moment, but Kerry let it go.
- Bush's threatened veto of $87 billion. Kerry is taking it in the gut with Bush hammering him on this issue. This is the one case where he should go into detail and explain the whole thing, because the full explanation is damaging to Bush. Kerry sponsored an amendment to roll back the tax cuts enough to pay for the $87 billion, and Bush threatened to veto any such measure. He never had to, but is on record threatening a veto. Kerry's no vot was symbolic because the bill had enough support anyway. Also, that $87 billion will still have to come out of our taxes someday, only now we have to pay interest on it as well.
- Noone held accountable for false intelligence. Bush said Kerry "saw the same
intelligence that I did" regarding WMD and Iraq, apparently saying that he was fooled like everyone else. Kerry should have taken him to task for apparently accepting the status quo in spite of this collossal failure. (The real truth is that Cheney, Rummy, and the Likud party that has taken over the Pentagon was simply lying through their teeth, but that's another issue) seeing this as a reasontaking any steps to do anything about it. The 9/11 commission has made reccomendations that Bush supports, but Bush initially opposed the 9/11 commission itself.
- Not pointing out Bush's many flip flops
- Bush initially opposed the 9/11 commission, then reversed.
- Bush reluctantly accepted 9/11 commission but said he would not testify. Then testified, but only if Uncle Dick was in the room to coach.
- Imposed steel tariffs, then withdrew them when the heat got to be too much.
- the aformetioned flip flops on bin laden
Oh well, two more strikes before anyone is out.Agreed. He tried to save himself by going to the thesauras, but we could still tell.
As for the funding vote, I can't believe that you can look at me with a straight face and say that you've never heard of funding bills with all kinds of nasty riders on them.
Just what the hell was this "nasty rider" that John Kerry was voting against? I heard from once source it was something about reducing vet's benefits, and from another that it was because he couldn't get a tax cut rider that he wanted on the bill. And moreover, why would something as insignificant as either of those be enough for him to vote no on a bill that is meant to give support to our troops?
And enough BS about talking points and just imagine for a moment that reasoning people can come up with the same conclusions.
"Gentlemen you can't fight here this is the War Room". Well someone had to say it! I guess now I can add, "Gentlemen you can argue here this is a Presidential Debate!"
Another Bush error Kerry missed: regarding the bilateral talks with North Korea, Bush opposed them because the Chinese wouldn't be at the table. But according to Joe Biden, the Chinese have asked us to enter bilateral talks. Pointing that out in realtime would have made Bush look even sillier.
Even so, Bush was simply outclassed at the debate. He couldn't speak in paragraphs, he seemed to struggle to fill his 2 minutes, and at times he let this little whine come into his voice that was most unpresidential. Memo to Bush: lose the whine.
--- Often in error; never in doubt!
It took some time to find an online version of the debate with better quality than c-span. Finally I sat down with the moronic javascript on foxnews.com that doesn't work because of an undefined variable and extracted the url to the actual real media files. They are distributed over http, so you can pull them with wget before watching
0 .r m0 0.r m0 0.r m0 0.r m0 0.r m0 0.r m
http://66.230.216.3/093004/yd_debate1_093004_30
http://66.230.216.3/093004/yd_debate2_093004_3
http://66.230.216.3/093004/yd_debate3_093004_3
http://66.230.216.3/093004/yd_debate4_093004_3
http://66.230.216.3/093004/yd_debate5_093004_3
http://66.230.216.3/093004/yd_debate6_093004_3
Yes, and that may a key reason why the opinion polls are more variable this year than most. Polls try to measure "likely voters," but how do you identify "likely" in a high-turnout year? Hence the argument between Gallop and MoveOn.org. But there's still room for improvement. Check out this table of registered voter turnout. In the USA in 2000, it was 67.4%. Many nations have much igher turnout. Here's some turnout figures as a percent of population from wikipedia
My point with this data is to underscore that if either party could get a third of its stay-at-homes in battleground states to turn out on Nov 2, they would sweep the battlegrounds. There is plenty of gold to be mined there.
Historically, Republicans have optained higher turnout than Democrats (sorry I couldn't easily google the numbers to support this). In any case, the Bush campaign is addressing the question "why do our people stay at home?" Maybe their voters are disgusted with both candidates. If so, maybe gay marriage or a similar issue will get them to the polls. Otherwise, try and make the race about the other guy; make him even more disgusting.
Historically, the demographic groups that vote Democratic tend to under-register and turn out less. Also, historically according to Charlie Cook late undecided voters eventually vote 2:1 or 3:1 against the incumbent. They also tend to come from the middle of the political spectrum; hence undecided. So Kerry has two ways to draw voters: one is to reach for the middle -- keep the undecideds from going to Bush -- if they merely stay undecided, he gets a big chunk of them. The other is to register and turn out his traditional demographic supporters.
Why don't the republicans reach for the middle, the undecideds? An excellent question. Their strategy is set by Karl Rove and he's the best in the business, so I'm confident it's their best bet. My guess is that going negative will repel some of the middle, but increase turnout of the base, while staying positive would do a little of the opposite. Rove must have weighed the two carefully and chosen what he thought would get the most votes.
--- Often in error; never in doubt!
In this case, I believe it was that he wanted the $87 billion to be paid for out of tax increases (or decreases in the republican tax breaks, if you like), rather than from out of thin air (borrowing from the fed. reserve).
Given that both sides wanted to send $87 billion to the war effort, it's not like his voting against one form of the bill is going to prevent funding from being made available. It's disingenuous of you to conflate this kind of congressional argument with some kind of attack on 'our troops' (a phrase rather cynically called upon by everyone to support their side of the argument of the day).
If you bothered to start reasoning and stop emoting, maybe you'd be able to come to the same conclusions.