Yes.

This was really a stunning piece of information. If Carville works on the Clinton campaign for '08 (which he undoubtedly will), this needs to be brought up. What kind of team player feeds the opposing side such privileged information? From what I understand, the provisional ballots ended up being 150,000, a number that would no way bring Kerry over the top. What happened to the extra 100,000 the night before?

Somebody needs to ask Carville point blank if this happened. Because countless disasters have happened as a result of Bush being re-elected, and it'll be an utter betrayal if Carville played a part in that defeat.

Carville must die.

For the performance in "Our Brand in Crisis" if nothing else, even if this particular story is lie. No, at this point I think Republicans and Dems marrying is impossible.

I agree, there needs to be some more digging here - it's half of a story. We need an insider from the Kerry campaign to tell us why Kerry really didn't go to Ohio.

I don't remember what his public reason for punking out was, but it was probably something like, "I concede defeat for the good of the nation." Whatever that means.

What did Blackwell do and how did that stop Kerry from going to Ohio?

Its imperative that this story be confirmed by the Democrats, and if it is true, as much as I like him, Carvill has to be drummed out of the party.

I'll say it again, and I'm not doing it to defend Carville. But suppose it happened just like Woodward says:

How did this force Kerry to concede when his intentions were otherwise? There may be a story here, but I just don't see it. MJ - what am I missing?

This story about Carville doesn't surprise me a bit; IF IT IS TRUE--and I say that advisedly, considering it came from Bob Woodward, whose credibility is next to nil in my opinion, it's just more evidence of their collusion in the crimes and corruption which is destroying our constitution and our democratic republic.

I was in Ohio as a Kerry Voter Protection volunteer and precinct captain. Like most volunteers there, I thought the Kerry campaign surrendered too early so the Carville revelation is troubling though I don’t know if the provisional ballots would have made a difference. I think the campaign was lost because too few machines were provided at city polling places, something no post election challenge was likely to correct.

Thousands of Ohio Democrats were forced to wait hours while Republicans in the suburbs and rural Ohio had no lines at all. “So Goes the Nation”, which is just opening in New York, and soon DC, LA, and Atlanta, shows just how screwed up the Kerry campaign was as well as this disparity in machines and waiting times. (Every Democratic activist should see it. It doesn’t address the cheat factor but does show how Dems flunked campaign 101 and teaches some lessons we had better absorb before 2008.)

Being in Ohio and seeing the lines of African American voters waiting hour upon hour to vote sure felt like intentional voter suppression to me. The Kerry camp should have had the balls to take their damn time in conceding. What happened in Ohio to black voters seemed surreal, straight out of the deep South before the Voting Rights Act -- an outrage wheter or not it effected the outcome. The Kerry camp should have seen it coming. I hope Woodward got the Carville story wrong because at least Carville knows how to run a winning campaign. The Kerry team sure didn’t.

I agree that Kerry was right to concede.

Clearly he had lost the popular vote. If like Gore he had won it I think he should have pursued any reasonable chance ( maybe Ohio could be defined that way ) of overturning his apparent electoral vote deficit i.e. of achieving the outcome
for which most people voted.

But for a loser in the popular vote to be the one who created the second contested vote in a row could have done lasting damage to the party. We wouldn't now be in the position of contending for both houses.

If Ohio had looked truly marginal , it would have been a tougher call. My argument above ought to have still applied , I think, but Kerry would have had a conflicting obligation to his supporters
which he would have had to consider.

As it was, I think he was right.

yep, sure is troubling if it's true. I like Carville and have a modicum of respect for Matalin, but I've never quite understood how and why James Carville and Mary Matalin be married to each other.

It's not hard to "support the Dems". Who are they any more. It seems to me they've almost all sold out to the right anyway. It's all a big game to them. And we're the suckers because we don't demand better. They have convinced us it is not realistic to expect honesty, integrity, an authentic fight for the little guy, a genuine effort towards peace, a commitment to the environment, and a passion to make health care a right for every American.

I don't see the issue. Yes, a lot of shady things happened in Ohio in 2004, but you haven't described anything that Carville said to Matalin (or that Matalin said to the White House) that would have altered the number of ballots cast for Kerry and for Bush.

If there had been more machines in urban areas or better rules for provisional ballots, then Kerry might have had enough votes to carry Ohio. But those battles needed to be fought before - not after - November 2, 2004.

Seems to me that Carville and all the other Clintonistas wanted Kerry to lose so that Hillary would have her chance in '08. Sorry to say it, but that's what it looks like to me. You put everything on the "Kerry campaign", but what is that really? Is that not the Democratic party? And, it is troubling indeed that the people who knew how to "win" (if you call 43% of the vote winning), would betray a confidence as well as tell Kerry to a) back the amendments that banned gay marriage (aka hate amendments) and b) tell Kerry to concentrate on the economy. Very bad advice in my view.

Thank you for all you did as a precinct captain, but I do feel like you're trying to put all Democratic problems on Kerry; that is dangerous because by scapegoating him, you're not concentrating that criticism on the entire party which needs to get its act together if we're going to win more elections.

I was there too, in an area of Columbus that tends progressive, working in a GOTV effort. Waiting times in our solidly middle-class neighborhoods didn't drop below two hours.

I have friends and co-workers in outlying suburbs who reported waiting times that exceeded 5 minutes only during the morning, lunch and evening rush hours.

The many technical studies of queueing theory show that one can extend queue wait times very easily with a small under-assignment of queue service resources. This means that a small "adjustment" of voting machine allocation could have an "apparently unexpected" effect on voter wait times.

I have been a software geek for more than 35 years and have been developing real time systems most of those years. (Mostly communications infrastructure such as switching/signalling in the SS7 network, with some time in flight management systems and cockpit instrumentation...)

I support any voting system that is scalable and supports publicly observable counting. Scalability requires that we not use a resource such as voting machines which can be artificailly under-allocated as was probably the case in 2004 in Ohio. Public observation of the counting process requires that the individual votes be observable by human beings without technical assistance.

Paper ballots can be printed by machines for those who require accesibility assistance. In complicated elections, or elections with heavy turnout, it's possible to increase "queue servers" simply by giving ballots and pencils to qualified voters who can take their time to decide without blocking the entire process.

I cannot state that I *personally* saw manipulation supported by legally-acceptable evidence. I have met people who have investigated ballots in several counties and make the claim that they did indeed see such evidence. But I do know that in 2004 I did personally observe several conditions:

• It was extremely inconvenient for working people to vote in the precincts that I was in a position to watch, due primarily to an insufficient allocation of voting machines.
• Volunteers have used the digital camera that I loaned to them to photograph ballots from punch-card machines that showed statistically significant overvotes where both Kerry and third-party punches had been made.

So... Did Kerry win? I don't know whether the manipulation of the vote itself would have changed the outcome of the election. But I do believe there are very real questions about whether people who would tend toward Kerry were even able to get to the poll.

I don't know whether the Kerry folks should have been more insistent. It's hard to describe the toxicity of the "tone of conversation" coming from those who believed, rightly or wrongly, in the importance of re-electing Mr. Bush.

Despite being a very happy programmer with plenty of real time and embedded systems development experience, I believe that our voting systems must be built to be scalable and allow for public counting by unaided humans.

When you connect this information with that contained in Robert Kennedy Jr.'s investigative report in Rolling Stone the picture becomes very dark indeed. Go read that report, if you haven't, and learn all the details over at the The Free Press.

What is absolutely unsettling is that Blackwell's actions are very likely tantamount to Election Fraud. He was chided or blocked by judges on constitutional grounds on several things, but many things he did went either unpunished, or the reprimand came after the damage was done.

Why did Woodward not place this tidbit on the front page of the Washington Post when he learned it? Are his profits more important than his loyalty to the U.S.?

Why hasn't someone sued/jailed Carville for election tampering?

The only thing that distinguishes this from Watergate is that Carville, a trusted Democratic aide, willingly betrayed his superiors, giving away their confidential plans. He very likely killed them, at least politically.

I view Carville, who seemingly had real fire during the Clinton years, as a clown who now keeps himself going by being some kind of pundit. He doesn't jab real hard, doesn't really seem to be full of p. and v. and often makes semi-crytic remarks. There's a career out there for so-called pundits; the TV screen calls out for them. I don't see where Carville has a strong or large base of supporters. Maybe he's become a career talk-show person, who the TV hosts know they can call on, and he earns his living that way. I don't really see him as a deep thinker or stretegist; just as I always saw Joe Lieberman as smary, too slick, so I see Carville as a pseudo Democratic defender. Very different from someone who really seems to do the job like Cliff Schecter.

This is an appalling story. I can see only two explanations: Carville was either acting on behalf of his wife (and thereby betraying The Democratic Party) or, worse, he was trying to ensure Kerry lost to ensure that Hillary wouldn;t have to wait 8 years for a chance to run.

Either way, there ought to be some explanations forthcoming from someone.

John Conyers' website and RFK Jr.'s Rolling Stone article have a lot of info about the Ohio 2004 election debacle.

Tom

IIRC Blackwell told Kerry that the number of outstanding votes was less then the margin bewtween Bush & Kerry. Something like there are 90k outstanding porvisionals, and the margin is 125k.

As was discussed on Democratic Underground, the real number of uncounted votes was closer to 400k. RFK Jr's math is very close to that number. Anyway, Kerry thinks that he doesnt have enough of the provisionals to make up the difference.

Blackwell lied to Kerry. No one knew the real provisional ballot numbers until much later. SO.. leave the 250k number out of the story, it just complicates the jist of the story.

This is how the story should read: Kerry said he is headed for Ohio. Jim tells Mary, Mary tells the boyz in the WH. The WH tells Blackwell that Kerry is on the way to Ohio. Blackwell lies to Kerry. Kerry quits.

We at DU suspected this by the end of 2004. We knew that Blackwell lied. By the end of the Ohio recount, enough Kerry votes showed up to make the Margin between Bush & Kerry about 112k.

By August of 2004, Kerry had raised around 3.5 million for his legal contingency fund. He was ready to fight.

Roger Fox

I also think that Kerry caved too quickly. That is not to say that I mean to 'put everything on the "Kerry campaign" .' The Democrats demonstrated a whole series of failures in the 2004 and the 2000 elections.

For a list of a lot of the failures, read "Crashing the Gates."

But I really think that there is one key difference between Republicans and Democrats. On a National level the Democrats fear looking like they want to win at all costs. The Republicans are proud to look like they will do anything to win, and they love to do whatever they can to make the Democrats publicly look like they will. This needs to be corrected, and the existing Democrat establishment inside the beltway has a vested interest in not correcting it.

James Carville was an outsider when he ran the Clinton War Room. Now he is one of the inside the beltway Democratic consultants. If the story of him going behind Kerry's back to give the Republicans Kerry's plans for dealing with the Ohio election misdeeds is correct, then he is another TV personality who has become too damned full of himself and unwilling to compromise his judgment in order to help the Democrats win an election. ~IF~ that story is true, then no major Democratic candidate should ever trust him again. We need to win elections more than we need to stroke the egos of Democratic election consultants. Too many of them are Prima-donnas too full of themselves to fade into the background and let the candidate take the credit for winning. (It costs them money on future contracts to do that.)

Right now the Democrats and anti-Republicans need to recognize that it is more importnat to stop the Republican domination of the Federal Government than it is to be unified on some set of policies. We need to want the win in every House and Senate race so badly we will compromise with the Devil to get it. Prima- donnas need to be controlled. But it should now be clear that wins by Democratic candidates are necessary if the U.S. Constitution is to last beyond 2006. Perhaps we can unify around that.

I wonder if Carville would agree?

In order to effectively change what large groups of people do, you have to have large sums of money. The result is that decision-makers tend to do what the providers of the money want them to do. This is true for all organizations.

When all politicians get their money from corporate America, they will all tend to support whatever is wanted by corporate america. Politicians who work for the comman persons need to have institutions that collect small amounts of money from such common people to support their activities. Those institutions need to be either unions or government.

Corporations in America have been successful in destroying the abilities of unions to organize, and similarly have prevented any form of government support for election candidates. The only remaining source of funds in large amounts are corporations. Guess who dominates American politics?

Guess why the blogosphere is being demonized in the media? Why does David Broder detest bloggers? Because they have shown some possibility of breaking the above corporate domination of politics. Old pundits become scared of change.

Watch how money-providing institutions grow. That will tell you how the politics are changing. The old institutions will resist and that is all that will be heard for quite a while.

Kerry conceeded the loss and saved himself and the nation another round of needless shame and embarassment.

If Kerry had litigated the election in Ohio then the illegal voter manipulations by Black would have been thoroughly exposed, and the public could have been prepared to take actions to prevent those forms of vote stealing in the future.

As it is, the best we have gotten is a Rolling Stone article by RFK nearly two years later, and there is no real public awareness of the way Republicans have been stealing elections.

Granted, I do not think that Kerry would have won the election even with lawsuits. For Kerry himself, the expenditure of funds would have been unnecessary, and might have used funds that could be used in later elections. But such exposures might have also led to much greater ability to succeed at fundraising for future elections, also. Whatever, it wouldn't have helped Kerry so why do it?

Maybe because it would hurt the Republicans in the future, and helped to build the Democratic Party? Hell! Wouldn't want to build the Democratic Party - like contesting all Congressional elections does - would they?

Too many people have been focusing on the dameage to America in terms of foreign policy and our general ability to influense other nations. They are missing the fact that Cheney/Bush is literally destroying the checks-and-balances of the Constitution.

We have been watching the Constitutionally established (by the Foundimg fathers) Democratic Republic of America be destroyed by an authoritarian and Imperial philosophy of government more appropriate to the period of the Divine Right of Kings than to modern democratic governments. The use of Signing Statements should be declared Unconstitutional by the Congress before it goes to the Courts. Membership in the Federalist Society should become an automatic disqualification for appointment as a Federal Judge.

America as a democracy is under attack. We need to defend it.

deb

I think your analysis is wrong. Contesting the 2004 votes in Ohio would have been good for America. Getting a Democrat elected would have been good for America.

We have another party that is willing to suppress voters. Who is willing to cover up for a President whose view of his office is monarchical. We have a party who allows a fundamentally undemocratic process to continue in order to maintain power.

Winning in 2004 would have been the best thing that could have happened to America.

coop

Oh gee, don't tell me you folks are finally getting a glimpase of who James Carville really is. For ten years Latin Americans have been trying to tell you what he's really like, but no, poor brunettes south of Miami can't possibly know what they're talking about, now can they.

Carville made more money in the 90's as the uber fascist/billionaire Gustavos Cisneros' strategist than he'll ever make off the Democratic party. His complicity in the 2002 coup attempt in Venezuela is legendary in South America. To put it mildly, when he thinks people like you aren't watching, this guy's really freaky.

When the hell are you people going to wake up to the fact that America is not THE world?

I appreciate the information.I wasn't aware
of Carville's Latin American clients.

Thanks.

Like others, I am not sure what effect this actually had on Kerry's decision not to contest, but I also agree that Carville needs to be asked whether he did this and why. Not because Carville is a "disloyal Dem" if he did, but because it brings to bear questions on his competence.

Maybe he thought he could shake the bushes and reveal some Bush strategy by bringing this out. If so, it appears he was mistaken. Did he really say he disagreed with the decision? If not, maybe he was trying to bully Bush/Cheney into backing off. But before another Dem hires him to "help" we need to know what his thoughts were at the time.

MJ,

You bet.

It will be interesting to see if Carville tries to deny the story.

Of course, he may not feel it is worth denying unless he's asked the question directly.

OTOH, we have to wonder (a bit) if the story is true as told.

I'm not the first one to feel that Woodward himself has become a bit of an opportunist. HIS story that he didn't know then (when he wrote his first two Bush books) what he knows now (after writing the third) seems a bit too convenient to me. There's just been too much reporting between these two events to believe this, coming as it does from a reporter who has supernatural access to insiders.

You're welcome Tom.

Starting a Sunday off by being reminded that the USA is not the world is a great way to start the week. The world really is flat. Glad I could help.

You are nuts. I just spent a week being civil about gay people in this forum. If you think otherwise and you are gay, vote Republican.

You are confusing being pleasant with being nice. I'm not an especially polite person but I am a good one.

I would never make anyone's sexual orientation an issue in politics or the workplace.

I was delighted when my gay county legislator, Jon Cooper, marched in the Huntington St. Patrick's Day Parade with his partner and his children. It meant that the Catholics in my town were more tolerant than the Catholics in NYC.

Ask my one and only gay friend of fifteen years about how concerned I am about gay people. She was my employee and had a crush on me for three years before I even realized she was gay. I cared about the quality of her work, not whether her "distant cousin" was her life partner.

To me, Ken Mehlman being gay is as relevant an issue as Rudy Giuliani's three marriages and his flagrant philandering.

Again, I expect this country's leaders to ascribe to the same values as they expouse for me.

I have no intention of being civil about my feelings towards James Carville and Mary Matlin. They are one of the best examples of what is wrong in Washington DC.

I cannot even watch them on television anymore because they make me physically nauseous. I once wrote that Carville and Matlin market their marriage as a grownup Punch & Judy show.

This country is at war and I am not amused by their bantering back and forth as if the most important issues in the world are a joke. Maybe Tim Russert finds Matalin and Carville amusing but I did not watch Meet the Press to be amused.

I don't watch Meet the Press anymore.

If James Carville has integrity, how could he be married to someone who worked hard to manufacture lies to convince Americans to go to war?

Mary Matalin was a member of the White House Iraq Group. The Iraq Group's mission was to generate pro-war propaganda whether it was true or not. I don't see any difference between Goebbels'job and Mary Matalin's.

Mary Matalin is immoral and corrupt. Why in the world would anyone who was moral and not corrupt waste ten minutes of precious life with Mary Matalin, let alone allow her to raise your children?

What values will Mary Matalin instill in her children? Will she tell them to lie and cheat and do whatever it takes to win?

Will Matalin tell her children it is okay to let other people die for you for no goddamned reason other than to advance your political agenda and line your bank account?

To me, James Carville is more corrupt than his wife. She is like the scorpion in the fable in that she is what she is. But Carville pretends to be someone he is not.

One reason I am sure Matalin married Carville solely to advance her career and have children is that Mary Matalin is a lot smarter than her husband. Carville is a first-class bore and relies on his southern "charm" to get by.

Carville's routine is so old that I cannot believe Matalin is not thinking of ditching him. How she could listen to Carville day in and day out is beyond me. I know I couldn't do it.

If the Democrats want to give James Carville a role in the future of the Party, the Democrats deserve to lose elections.

The more I know about the Clinton administration, the more convinced I am that Bill Clinton's political talent is vastly overrated.

In July, I wrote a post about how Robert Warren Meddoff was a ringer. Meddoff was a relatively obscure player in the Clinton saga who testified before the Senate that Harold Ickes told him to destroy certain documents.

I did not even know who Meddoff was until I came across his name almost accidentally in 2002 when I was "investigating" Charlie Gargano, Bush pioneer. I looked into the Meddoff story and realized that Meddoff was a liar who was paid by Gargano to embarrass the Clinton administration.

I wrote to Harold Ickes via email and told him what I had learned about Meddoff. I was puzzled when he never replied so I wrote again and tried to be more clear as to what I was telling him. Still no reply.

Now I realize that Harold Ickes probably does not want to acknowledge the White House's incompetency. No one in the Clinton administration ever did a basic background check on Medddoff before he testified.

If anyone had checked on Meddoff, he or she would have found out that Meddoff was not a consultant to foreign companies as he was portrayed by the Repubicans but a ne'er do well down on his luck. Alarms would have gone off.

Roll your eyes but I think I would have done a better job defending the Democrats in the '90s than Bill Clinton's crew. I would at least have kept Denise Rich out of the loop. Nice person but Denise Rich has a big mouth.

And from the sound of it, so does James Carville.

From Woodward's book (I just finished it today):

Kerry realized that fighting would mean leaving the country in aisarray for the second presidential election in a row. It was a decision he would have to make himself. He decided to accept the result. "To do otherwise," he said later in an interview, "would have been personal. It would have been venal. It would have been just the wrong thing to do when you're running for president of the United States. It's just what my gut told me. It just said to me, 'Look, this is the presidency.' And as much as I fought for it and as much as we care about what we fought for, there are larger interests that you've got to think about." Ironically, though he would not become president, he said,"It was sort of the kind of presidential moment if you will, and I felt the right thing to do at that point was not prolong the agony and not put the country through it no matter how personally invested in it we all were."
He added, "Based on the numbers we had, you would have had to challenge the underlying foundation of the election. And as strongly as I feel that it is flawed, deeply flawed, I made just the fundamental decision that that was the wrong thing to do."

Beautiful analysis of the "conjoined twins" Marville & Catalin! I love your passion too. Thank you.

In AA's defence, and with no disrespect to you intended, I believe it can be perfectly legitimate to regard a comment as being of marginal value, even without disputing any of the facts inherent in it.

If this is true, Carville should never be allowed to work on a Democratic campaign again.

As for elections and voting, I have a simple question:

If I can go to any ATM in this country and withdraw money from my bank account, why can't I go to any voting precinct and vote? If I can log into my email account from any computer in this country, why can't I vote anywhere in this country? Why do I have to stand in line for hours in the city while people in Knuckledrag are in and out in 5 minutes?

This technology is real. It is common. It's in every aspect of our lives - except our elections. I should be able to stop at any voting booth and be able to pull up a screen for my district and vote and have a copy of that vote print out or send to my email address or mailed to my home. Diebold already does this with our money, so why can't they do it with our votes?

There's only one reasonable explanation - because it would make stealing an election virtually impossible.

You want confirmation. Fair enough.

It was posted in the latest Woodward book. If you accept Woodward, then you accept this. If you have reservations about Woodward, then you have reservations about this.