DICK MORRIS: ROUND UP ON BUSH'S LEAD
Does Dick Morris know what he’s talking about?
If he does, then the Kerry campaign should be awfully worried.
How big is Bush's lead? Don't believe the surveys that show it in the 5- to 7-point range. Believe the surveys of Time and Newsweek, which show a lead in excess of 10 points.
The difference is because pollsters disagree about whether or not to weight their results to keep constant the ratio of Republicans, Democrats and Independents in their sample. Some polling firms treat party affiliation as a demographic constant and, when they find that their sample has too many Republicans, they weight down each Republican interview and assign an extra weight to each Democratic response.
But other polling firms — and I — disagree. We feel that political party is not a demographic, like gender or race or age. If the survey finds more Republicans than usual, we think it's because the country has become more Republican, so we treat the result as a indicator of national mood, not of statistical error.
Time and Newsweek both picked up major moves toward the GOP in the wake of the convention. Likely the other firms did too, but they treated the finding as a mistake and weighed down the Republican interviews, making the race appear to be closer than it really is.
The debates are likely to help Bush, since Kerry's supporters are so divided on the war and on terrorism. Almost whatever Kerry says is likely to lose him a share of his voters. For example, 37 percent of his supporters told the Rasmussen Poll that they want America to give priority to making democracy work in Iraq, while 54 percent want Kerry to emphasize troop withdrawal. So when Kerry said Monday that he'd prioritize bringing the troops home, his comments appealed to the majority of his voters but alienated more than a third of them. The debates are fraught with such traps.
So look for September to be a good Bush month. But, in October, Kerry will close at least part of the gap. Democrats always do.
SHARON BUSH: KITTY KELLEY IS LYING
Wow. Just as the Bush's National Guard story starts looking like it's relying on fishy documents, Kitty Kelly's star witness accuses the author of putting words in her mouth.
President Bush's former sister-in-law denied yesterday that she had given author Kitty Kelley any information about allegations of past drug use by Bush.
Sharon Bush is quoted in Kelley's forthcoming book about the Bush family as making one of the allegations, and Kelley's editor said in an interview Tuesday that she had provided "confirmation" for the information.
But Sharon Bush, who is divorced from the president's brother Neil, said in a statement: "I categorically deny that I ever told Kitty Kelley that George W. Bush used cocaine at Camp David or that I ever saw him use cocaine at Camp David. When Kitty Kelley raised drug use at Camp David, I responded by saying something along the lines of, 'Who would say such a thing?'
"Although there have been tensions between me and various members of the Bush family, I cannot allow this falsehood to go unchallenged."
Doubleday, Kelley's publisher, was quick to dispute her account.
"Doubleday stands fully behind the accuracy of Ms. Kelley's reporting and believes that everything she attributes to Sharon Bush in her book is an accurate account of their discussions," said Associate Publisher Suzanne Herz. "Ms. Kelley met with Sharon Bush over the course of a four-hour lunch on April 1, 2003, at the Chelsea Bistro in Manhattan."
The next day, Herz said, Kelley had a 90-minute phone conversation with Bush in the presence of Peter Gethers, her Doubleday editor. Gethers confirmed the accuracy of the statement yesterday.
Kelley "has notes to corroborate both these conversations," Herz said, and Bush "understood that anything she said could be used for publication."
You think this one-two punch of the National Guard and cocaine allegations are going to backfire?
ABOUT THAT BUSH DOCUMENT
I want to reserve my final judgment on this one — but the early evidence doesn't look good for CBS, or the Boston Globe.
The Boston Globe runs a front-page story today, declaring:
In August 1973, President Bush's superior officer in the Texas Air National Guard wrote a memorandum complaining that the commanding general wanted him to ''sugar coat" an annual officer evaluation for First Lieutenant Bush, even though Bush had not been at the base for the year in question, according to new documents obtained and broadcast last night by CBS News.
The commander, the late Lieutenant Colonel Jerry B. Killian, wrote that he turned aside the suggestion from Brigadier General Walter B. Staudt, Bush's political mentor in the Guard. But he and another officer agreed to ''backdate" a report — evidently the evaluation — in which they did not rate him at all. There is such a report in Bush's file, dated May 2, 1973.
''I'll backdate but won't rate," Killian apparently wrote in what is labeled a ''memo to file." Initials that appear to be Killian's are on the memo, but not his name or unit letterhead.
The August 1973 document, dated as Bush was preparing to leave Texas to attend the Harvard Business School, represents the first apparent evidence of an attempt to embellish Bush's service record as his time in the Guard neared its end.
Check out the document here. There does not appear to be a link to the document from the Globe. Instead, they type up what it says on their own site, and mention, "The document carries no letterhead or clear identification of the author."
Kerry Spot readers have been e-mailing all morning, pointing to PowerLine blog's contention this is a forged document, written on a modern computer. The typeface doesn't look anything like something written on a typewriter in 1973.
Now it appears this document includes include the superscript "th" in 187th, and as a Powerline correspondent points out, "There are no keys on any typewriter in common use in 1973 which could produce a tiny "th." The forger got careless after creating the August 1, 1972 document and slipped up big-time."
CBS News and the Globe ought to check this out big-time, and fast. If they ran with a story based on a forgery (and a forgery that the blogosphere managed to check out in just a few hours) this report will join Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair, and Janet Cooke in journalism's hall of infamy.
UPDATE: From Kerry Spot reader Christopher: "As a graphic designer, another thing pops out at me in that supposed Guard memo...the apostrophes. They don't seem consistent with a typewriter. A typewriter would have straight apostrophes, not the curly-queue kind."
UPDATE, AGAIN: Ready for real typeset-lingo? A couple of Kerry Spot readers explain that the memo linked above is "proportionally spaced," meaning a thin letter like an "i" or an "l" takes less space than an "n" or an "m". Apparently proportional spacing was impossible on typewriters during this period.
UPDATE, YET AGAIN: Everybody and their brother is weighing in. One guy says, the "IBM Selectric typewriters from that era contained a variety of "typing
elements" that included virtually all modern typefaces, and included
superscript, subscript and other secondary typeface characters. The
Selectric was the common typewriter in that era in many governmental and
military offices."
Then the very next e-mail says, "due to its relatively high price in relation to other typewriters, the odds of an IBM Executive Typewriter appearing in an Air National Guard office are slim. Also, typists needed additional training in
order to operate them effectively."
Then another Kerry Spot reader did an experiment to create the same document in Microsoft Word, and found, "There appears to be 2 spaces afterthe sentence "I will not rate." And all the words line up perfectly using Times New Roman size 12. Each line ends in the same word. I would tend to believe that the chances of a person anticipating the appropriate time to go to the next line in the exact manner that Microsoft Word does it automatically due to preset margins is highly unlikely."
Yet another Kerry Spot reader who worked in a similar environment writes, "when i worked for DOD, we printed on 8.5x10.5" paper. when you xerox a page, particularly an older one, it's common to see lines from the paper edges. The Bush memo here appears to be 8.5x11" but there are no lines visible on either top of page nor bottom of page.
All the filing cabinets i used were sized for less-than-letter sized paper. Placing a 8.5x11" page therein would entail folding the page. Creases are commonly visible on xeroxed copies."
By the way, a couple of e-mailers, upon learning that IBM's Selectric model had the ability to use "proportional type," are convinced this is a smoking gun, that the "this memo is a phony" crowd is automatically entirely discredited, and that I'm a partisan hack who should commit Seppuku in disgrace for even bringing up the argument others have made.
Can we turn down our outrage dials for a bit? CBS News and the Globe come out with a story that slams the president, based on a memo from personal office files, not Department of Defense files. The file does not look like it was written on a typewriter, and, in fact, resembles something written with modern word processing software and printed on a laser printer. People begin asking questions. Maybe this document is the real deal, maybe it isn't. Let's figure out what we can figure out, and withhold final judgment until all the facts are in.
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