Ruth Rosen, in the Nation (Oct. 28, 2004):

[Ruth Rosen, professor emeritus of history at the University of California and former columnist at the San Francisco Chronicle, is a senior fellow at the Rockridge Institute and author of The World Split Open: How the Modern Women's Movement Changed America (Penguin Putnam).]

Last winter, newspapers across the country publicized the startling fact that 22 million single women--including those never married, divorced, separated or widowed--simply didn't bother to vote in the 2000 presidential election."Women's Voices. Women Vote" (WVWV), the nonpartisan project that released this focused poll data, quickly dubbed these voters"Women on Their Own."

Had they voted in 2000, these voters would have sent Al Gore to the White House. Why? Because these women, many of whom are mothers, feel greater economic insecurity than married women. Single women also tend to be more progressive about social issues and are deeply concerned about improving the quality of public education, gaining access to healthcare, raising the minimum wage, demanding equal pay for equal work and protecting Social Security for their retirement.

The real story of this presidential election, then, is the widening Marriage Gap--the difference between how married and unmarried women vote--and what the presidential candidates have or have not done to mobilize these 22 million women.

Political analysts naturally expected that both presidential candidates would woo these women voters with a slew of seductive promises.

But that's not what happened.

Instead of addressing the everyday security needs of"women on their own," both candidates pandered to (largely married)"security moms" who were supposedly obsessed by the prospect of terrorist attacks. As Democratic pollster Anna Greenberg pointed out in September, unmarried women have seen the election as"dominated by a discussion of the war on terrorism and security."

During most of the campaign, neither of the candidates addressed this huge demographic bloc. True, John Kerry and John Edwards went on talk shows popular with women, but they talked about how they would fight terrorism. And yes, Bush's website has a section called"W Stands for Women," but it does not address concerns these women view as critical to their lives. It was only during the last few weeks of the campaign that Kerry rolled out a new stump speech that directly addressed women's economic security.

As it turned out,"security moms" proved to be more of a soundbite than an actual demographic group."Unlike the soccer or security moms," Greenberg recently told me,"these 22 million [single] women are not a fake group. They are 20 percent of the electorate, and their economic marginality makes them a huge demographic and voting bloc."

"They are cynical," said WVWV co-director Chris Desser,"and needed to be persuaded that their voice matters. They don't believe politicians understand or will address their concerns. In fact, nearly one-third of unmarried women polled said their main reason for not voting is that they believe their lives will not improve, no matter who is elected."

The first two debates did nothing to change that cynicism. Consider what happened when PBS moderator Gwen Ifill asked Vice President Dick Cheney and Senator John Edwards how they would address the growing epidemic of HIV/AIDS among heterosexual African-American women. Cheney said he hadn't heard about the problem; Edwards evaded the question and discussed Kerry's health plan.

During the third debate, Senator Kerry finally spoke directly to these 22 million women when he promised to protect Social Security, vowed to provide health insurance by ending Bush's tax cuts for those who earn more than $200,000 and pledged to raise the minimum wage, now at a deplorable $5.15 an hour, so that some 9.2 million women would earn an extra $3,800 a year. He also criticized the pay gap between men and women, expressed support for the principle of affirmative action and vowed not to appoint a Supreme Court Justice who would undo a woman's constitutional right to choose an abortion....

Garry Wills, in the NY Review of Books (Nov. 4, 2004):

What was the last election with great stakes in play? I suppose 1968. It was similar to this race, but (as it were) upside down. Both involve the problem of admitting a tragic mistake. The mistake in 1968 was a belief that where the French had failed in a long and committed colonial adventure in Indochina, we could replace them and succeed. We could do so, we thought, because we were not colonialists but supporters of indigenous freedom against world communism. We came with" clean hands."

The current mistake is a belief that we could enter the Mideast with clean hands as supporters of democratic values in the whole region, in opposition to world terrorism. We would do so with Donald Rumsfeld's swift military in-and-out operation to put friends like Ahmed Chalabi in charge and withdraw—just as we could use Robert McNamara's"surgical" and" counterinsurgent" operations to keep friends like Nguyen Van Thieu in charge of Vietnam before withdrawing. Both mistakes reflected an ignorance of the respective regions, a false view of America's reception by those being"helped," and an underestimation of American resistance to longer-term commitment than was first proposed.

Our election is an upside-down version of the 1968 one because the incumbent party was then most disposed to admit the mistake of Vietnam, though it had led us into the quagmire. President Kennedy's closest advisers had egged on President Johnson to sustain the war—but it was proving unsustainable, as Lyndon Johnson's withdrawal, the Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy presidential bids, and Hubert Humphrey's wobbling demonstrated. Had Humphrey won, his party would not have supported vigorous extension of the war—it had already admitted the mistake. Nixon, by contrast, though he vaguely referred to a plan for ending the war, had constituencies not disposed to that course. The anti-Communist rationale for the war was so strong that even when Nixon achieved his opening to China, Republicans who opposed that move said they would not stay with him unless he continued his commitment to the war—as he did throughout his first term. Only after many more casualties on both sides, and no accomplishment of our war aims, was the mistake finally (indirectly) admitted.

Today it is the incumbent party that refuses to admit the mistake made in the preemptive war on Iraq. Its ideological stake in the venture resembles that of the out party in 1968, while the current out party, despite Kerry's wobbling of the Humphrey sort, has a cumulative opposition to the war like that of the Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy insurgents in 1968 (their equivalents now being Howard Dean, Wesley Clark, and Dennis Kucinich). What will be done in Iraq remains unclear for both parties; but a sane policy must begin from a grasp of the mistake that was made, an understanding of which the Republicans seem incapable.

Will it take us decades and thousands of deaths to see our error in Iraq, as it did to see our error in Vietnam? It may well do so under another Republican term....

Robert Tucker and David C. Hendrickson, in Foreign Affairs (Nov./Dec. 2004):

[Robert W. Tucker is Professor Emeritus of American Foreign Policy at Johns Hopkins University. David C. Hendrickson is Robert J. Fox Distinguished Service Professor at Colorado College.]

The 18 months since the launching of the second Iraq war have brought home, even to its advocates, that the United States has a serious legitimacy problem. The pattern of the first Iraq war, in which an overwhelming victory set aside the reservations of most skeptics, has failed to emerge in the aftermath of the second. If anything, skepticism has deepened. The United States' approval ratings have plunged, especially in Europe-the cooperation of which Washington needs for a broad array of purposes-and in the Muslim world, where the United States must win over"hearts and minds" if it is to lessen the appeal of terrorism. In both areas, confidence in the propriety and purposes of U.S. power has dropped precipitously and shows little sign of recovery.

Legitimacy arises from the conviction that state action proceeds within the ambit of law, in two senses: first, that action issues from rightful authority, that is, from the political institution authorized to take it; and second, that it does not violate a legal or moral norm. Ultimately, however, legitimacy is rooted in opinion, and thus actions that are unlawful in either of these senses may, in principle, still be deemed legitimate. That is why it is an elusive quality. Despite these vagaries, there can be no doubt that legitimacy is a vital thing to have, and illegitimacy a condition devoutly to be avoided.

How to restore legitimacy has thus become a central question for U.S. foreign policy, although the difficulty of doing so is manifest. At a minimum, restoring international confidence in the United States will take time. The erosion of the nation's legitimacy is not something that occurred overnight. Washington is unlikely to succeed at renewing it simply by conducting better"public diplomacy" to"make the American case" to the world, for world public opinion already rejects the case that has been made. If the United States is going to be successful in recapturing legitimacy, it will have to abandon the doctrines and practices that brought it to this pass.

To understand the sources of U.S. legitimacy in the post-World War II era, it helps to examine the public professions of the country's leaders. They tell a remarkably consistent story, one that pledges the use of U.S. power to international law. Just as civilization itself is distinguished by the insistence that conflicts be settled by means other than brute force, so U.S. postwar leaders insisted that international relations be ordered by the same principle. This principle had all the more appeal because it was championed in circumstances in which, only a short time before, it had been blatantly violated. The old European order that perished in 1945 had begun its descent into oblivion and nihilism with the butchery of 1914 and with the declaration of Germany's then chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, that the treaty guaranteeing Belgium's neutrality was merely a"scrap of paper." The German regime that brought on World War II was even more contemptuous of international law. It acted avowedly on the principle that might makes right.

Much of the world in the twentieth century rebelled against this position. In 1945, at Nuremberg, Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, leading the American prosecution of the major Nazi war criminals, emphasized that the wrong for which German leaders were on trial was"not that they lost the war, but that they started it." Jackson refused to be"drawn into a trial of the causes of the war, for our position is that no grievances or policies will justify resort to aggressive war. It is utterly renounced and condemned as an instrument of policy." The same position was taken in the U.S.-inspired Charter of the United Nations. Peace was the great goal to which all other ends were subordinated. In obligating the UN's individual member states to refrain"from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state," the charter permitted but one clear exception: force could be employed in self-or collective defense against an armed attack.

Despite the repeated avowals of U.S. leaders committing their country to the rule of law, some influential pundits now maintain that international law had little or nothing to do with the legitimacy accorded the United States after 1945."It was not international law and institutions but the circumstances of the Cold War, and Washington's special role in it, that conferred legitimacy on the United States, at least within the West," writes noted commentator Robert Kagan."Contrary to much mythologizing on both sides of the Atlantic these days, the foundations of U.S. legitimacy during the Cold War had little to do with the fact that the United States helped create the UN or faithfully abided by the precepts of international law laid out in the organization's charter." Washington reserved for itself, he maintains, the right to intervene"anywhere and everywhere." These are convenient retrospective judgments regarding a state that now flouts principles it once held dear, but Kagan's position reflects a case of profound historical amnesia about the bases of U.S. internationalism.

In denigrating law as a pillar of U.S. legitimacy, Kagan emphasizes instead the role Washington played in containing Moscow. Although it is certainly true that the protection the United States accorded Western Europe from Soviet expansionism conferred legitimacy on U.S. power, it is equally true that allied diplomats repeatedly justified this enterprise in terms of its conformity with the principles of the UN Charter and its rule forbidding aggression. Had NATO been constituted on any other basis it would not have gained the support it did. This marrying of strategic vision and moral purpose is not so strange; indeed, neoconservatives themselves often emphasize that it ought to be the hallmark of U.S. foreign policy. Where they have departed from the classic understanding is in substituting their own moral purpose-promoting the extension of democracy, through force if necessary-for that favored by the architects of the post-World War II order, which emphasized the protection of the democratic community through rules constraining the use of force.

Click here to read the rest of this article.

Joshua Spivak, in The Hill (Oct. 26, 2004):

[Joshua Spivak is an attorney and media consultant.]

With a close, bitterly contested election coming to a possible photo-finish, the Electoral College is in for yet another beating. America's presidential election system is clearly the most heavily critiqued part of the original Constitution, as many complain about its anti-democratic distorting effect.
Calls go out from the editorial pages of leading newspapers to change the system to a strictly popular vote method.

However, for all of the ink that has been spilled about the Electoral College over the last few years, there has been a dearth of explanations for why the college exists, and how it was originally designed to work. The Electoral College was actually an intelligent compromise between many competing interests -- another mark in the system of checks and balances.

The avalanche of criticism would have come as a surprise to the founding fathers. The members of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 were particularly proud of the electoral system. Alexander Hamilton called the future Electoral College "excellent" and wrote that the method of selecting presidents was "almost the only part of the system, of any consequence, which has escaped without severe censure."

The many "anti-Federalist" opponents of the Constitution did not focus on what was to be called the Electoral College. Going back to the summer of 1787, the convention was not particularly focused on the executive branch.
Congress, not the president, was intended to be the locus of power, and the first months were focused on shaping the Great Compromise between large states and small -- the creation of a house of representatives apportioned by population and a Senate, where each state received two members. When the convention took up the presidency, they did not want to risk the compromise that had been forged. Rather, like the rest of the constitution, it was a compromise between a number of interests, large states and small, north and south, nationalists and state-righters.

Looking back, it is clear that the popular election of a president was not a prime concern, though not for the reasons many think. The option of choosing a president by popular vote was voted on a number of times during the convention, and only two states voted in its favor.

There were a number of reasons to oppose popular vote: Many of the conventioneers believed that the country was too large to directly elect the president; some Southerners realized their state's impact would be diluted, as the three-fifths compromise gave the slave states more impact in Congress than they would have in a popular vote; some states'-rights advocates wanted the states to have more of a say in the selection; small states were concerned that their votes would be drowned out; while still others simply did not trust the people to choose properly.

However, perhaps the most important reason for the lack of enthusiasm for the popular vote was that there was little experience in directly electing
executives: Throughout the country, the governors - the chief executives of each state -were not chosen by the voters. Instead, in 10 of the 13 original states, the state legislature chose the governor, and in two of the other three states, if no candidate received a clear majority, the legislature made the choice. This was the model for election that the conventioneers drew on. The original plans brought to Philadelphia, and the first outlines of a presidency adopted by the convention, all provided for election of the chief executive by Congress.

However, as every student is taught, America's government is built on the principle of checks and balances. The convention was concerned about handicapping the president by placing too much power in Congress' hands.
Therefore, a committee eventually designed an alternate Congress of electors, made up with the exact same amount of members, to choose the candidates. They also specifically banned any federal office holder from being a member of this congress, and, as an added protection, the electors did not meet as a national group, but rather met in each individual state.

Despite the creation of what would one day be the Electoral College -- it was not called this until the 1800s -- Congress still had some part to play in the selection of a president. In order to prevent the big states from dominating the choice, each elector was given two votes, one of which had to be cast for someone from another state.

Because of the diffuse nature of the nascent republic, many believed that the electors' votes would be divided among favorite sons, and therefore they would be unable to select a president. If this came to pass, the electors would have served as a nominating committee. The top five candidates would be sent to Congress, which would then select a president in a state by state vote of the congressional delegations, the winning candidate needing a majority of the states to succeed, the second place candidate would be the vice president.

This situation, where Congress selected the president from a set of nominees, came about twice, first in 1800 and then in 1824. The first resulted in the 12th Amendment, changing the Electoral College by dividing up the elector's vote into one for a presidential candidate and one for a vice presidential candidate; the second resulted in the creation of a strong two party system. With the exceptions of the disputed elections of 1876 and 2000, the Electoral College has since selected the president without complaint.

Despite the criticisms, it is clear that the Electoral College was not a hastily thrown together "Rube Goldberg" contraption, designed as an anti-democratic device intended to deprive the voters of the right to choose a president. Nor was its goal to benefit a few states. Instead, the founders wanted to create a functional government that was accepted by all. While if the founders were here today, they may not be thrilled with all aspects of the current Electoral College, it has definitely served their primary goal:
Providing a stable, fairly representative government for almost all of the country's existence.

[Robert S. McElvaine teaches history at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, is the author of Eve’s Seed: Biology, the Sexes, and the Course of History, and is currently completing his first novel and screenplay.]

The sign that ought to be on the wall at John Kerry’s campaign headquarters is: IT’S THE ILLUSION THAT IRAQ & THE WAR ON TERROR ARE THE SAME, STUPID!

That’s a little longer than the slogan on the sign in Bill Clinton’s campaign war room in 1992, but this time, it’s not the economy, stupid.

That seems odd at a time when the incumbent seeking reelection has: presided over the loss of more than a million private sector American jobs, the worst record since Herbert Hoover; overseen an economy in which the stock market suffered its worst decline in the first two years of any administration since Hoover’s; inherited an annual federal budget surplus of $230 billion and transformed it into a $400+ billion deficit in three years, a negative turnaround of two-thirds of a trillion dollars that is totally without precedent in our history; and seen more than a million additional Americans fall into poverty and more than a million lose health insurance in the past year alone.

It seems baffling how a president with a record like that could even be close in the polls to his challenger. The reason is that the Bush campaign has so far succeeded in getting a majority of the electorate to look in a different direction. In order to get the voters to focus on the economic and other disasters of the Bush presidency, the Democrats must first get them to turn their attention away from the greatest diversion cooked up by the Bush reelection team.

It is now clear that the outcome of this year’s critical presidential election hinges almost entirely on one question: Can George W. Bush keep a majority of the voting public believing the patently false claim that the Iraq War is part of the war against terrorism?

If the public continues to believe that invading Iraq was part and parcel of fighting against al Qaeda, President Bush will win reelection. If a majority of the public sees through the smoke and mirrors that have been so skillfully manipulated by Karl Rove, and understands that the Iraq War not only is not part of the struggle against Osama bin Laden, but has played right into his hands, lost the United States the great international support we had after 9-11, produced innumerable new terrorists, and actually made us much less safe, the second Bush presidency will go the way of the first.

Because the false link between the necessary and popular war against terror and the unnecessary and unpopular war against Iraq is the linchpin of Bush’s entire case for reelection, it must become the primary target of the Kerry campaign. If the Democrats can knock out that one fastener, the wheels of the Bush campaign will fly off and he will be beaten by a substantial margin.

George W. Bush and his administration are very inept when it comes to almost everything that matters—foreign policy, the economy, planning for military contingencies, etc. They are, however, very, very good at a few things that may matter more in winning elections: manipulating public perceptions, misdirecting public attention, and clothing their otherwise naked administration in an American flag woven of synthetic fabric (presumably by workers in China).

What the Kerry campaign needs is a Toto who can pull away the curtain behind which the Wizard of Rove is pulling the levers and turning the dials that continue to produce the humbug that the Iraq disaster is a war that is weakening terrorists and making us more secure. In fact, the Iraq war is just what Bush inadvertently said it was in a recent interview: a “catastrophic success”—an initial military success that has led to catastrophe.

If the public can be gotten to pay attention to the man behind the curtain, we will realize that we have been the victims of disorganized thinking that has been intentionally disorganized by the Bush team, and that we have within us the means to save ourselves: the ability to vote Bush out of office.

Ron Suskind's profile of George W. Bush reminded me eerily of Mao Zedong, the leader of the Chinese Communist Party. Suskind portrays Bush as filled with unwarranted certainty, sure that God is speaking and working through him, and convinced that decisive action shapes reality in ways that make it unnecessary to first study reality.

This approach to policy-making, it seems to me, should be called Right Maoism. The History Learning Site reminds us that in 1958 Mao initiated what he called the"Great Leap Forward" with the aim of boosting both Chinese industry and agriculture, through the reorganization of China into over 25,000 communes.

' Mao had introduced the Great Leap Forward with the phrase"it is possible to accomplish any task whatsoever." By the end of 1958, it seemed as if his claim was true . . . However, in 1959, things started to go wrong. Political decisions/beliefs took precedence over commonsense and communes faced the task of doing things which they were incapable of achieving. Party officials would order the impossible and commune leaders, who knew what their commune was capable of doing or not, could be charged with being a"bourgeois reactionary" if he complained. Such a charge would lead to prison.

Quickly produced farm machinery produced in factories fell to pieces when used. Many thousands of workers were injured after working long hours and falling asleep at their jobs. Steel produced by the backyard furnaces was frequently too weak to be of any use and could not be used in construction – it’s original purpose. Buildings constructed by this substandard steel did not last long.

Also the backyard production method had taken many workers away from their fields – so desperately needed food was not being harvested. Ironically, one of the key factors in food production in China was the weather and 1958 had particularly good weather for growing food. Party leaders claimed that the harvest for 1958 was a record 260 million tons – which was not true. '

' at the Bush administration's first National Security Council meeting, Bush asked if anyone had ever met Ariel Sharon. Some were uncertain if it was a joke. It wasn't: Bush launched into a riff about briefly meeting Sharon two years before, how he wouldn't ''go by past reputations when it comes to Sharon. . . . I'm going to take him at face value,'' and how the United States should pull out of the Arab-Israeli conflict because ''I don't see much we can do over there at this point.'' Colin Powell, for one, seemed startled. This would reverse 30 years of policy -- since the Nixon administration -- of American engagement. Such a move would unleash Sharon, Powell countered, and tear the delicate fabric of the Mideast in ways that might be irreparable. Bush brushed aside Powell's concerns impatiently. ''Sometimes a show of force by one side can really clarify things." '

"According to notes provided to me, and according to several guests at the lunch who agreed to speak about what they heard, he said that ''Osama bin Laden would like to overthrow the Saudis . . . then we're in trouble. Because they have a weapon. They have the oil."

" He said that there will be an opportunity to appoint a Supreme Court justice shortly after his inauguration, and perhaps three more high-court vacancies during his second term.

Bush said: ''I'm going to push nuclear energy, drilling in Alaska and clean coal. Some nuclear-fusion technologies are interesting.'' He mentions energy from ''processing corn . . . Do you realize that ANWR [the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge] is the size of South Carolina, and where we want to drill is the size of the Columbia airport?''

The questions came from many directions -- respectful, but clearly reality-based. About the deficits, he said he'd ''spend whatever it takes to protect our kids in Iraq,'' that ''homeland security cost more than I originally thought . . .''

''I'm going to come out strong after my swearing in,'' Bush said, ''with fundamental tax reform, tort reform, privatizing of Social Security.''

The two most significant elections in American history were in 1789 and 1793, when George Washington was elected, then re-elected as president. They were significant because he, by character and experience, was the ideal man to launch the new republic as its First Magistrate.

Everyone knew this, including Washington himself, though he accepted with "a heart filled with distress, the ten thousand embarrassments, perplexities and troubles to which I must again be exposed in the evening of life already unduly consumed in public cares" (but he was only 57). Neither election was a contest. Members of the electoral college were chosen by the states on the assumption they would vote for Washington, and that he would accept. The candidate spent even less than he did in 1758 getting himself elected a Virginian burgess, when he forked out £40 for 35 gallons of wine, 47 gallons of beer, two gallons of cider, half a pint of brandy and three barrels of rum punch.

Early elections (of Adams, Jefferson, Madison and Monroe) were usually sedate if far from unanimous affairs. John Quincy Adams's election in 1824 was a landmark because it accelerated the move toward choosing electors by popular vote. Out of 356,038 votes cast, Andrew Jackson emerged the clear leader with 153,544, Adams being 40,000 votes behind. Jackson also had the most electoral college votes, 99 to 84, with 78 for other candidates. But under the 12th Amendment, if no candidate got a majority of the college, the election went to the House, which picked the winner from the top three, voting by state. This put the choice effectively into the hands of Henry Clay, the all-powerful Speaker, who gave it to Adams, on the secret condition Adams made him secretary of state. Jackson denounced the election as "a corrupt bargain," and there was a growing feeling that future presidents must be chosen by the voters. Hence the re-run in 1828, in which Jackson again stood against Adams, was also of great significance since it was the first popular one in U.S. history.

It inaugurated the habit of long campaigns, since Tennessee nominated Jackson for president as early as Spring 1825, more than three years before the vote. The 1828 election saw the first "leak" and the first campaign posters. As Jackson was known as Old Hickory by his troops -- it was "the hardest wood in creation" -- Old Hickory clubs were formed all over the county, Hickory Trees were planted in towns, and Hickory Poles erected in villages. (Campaign badges and waistcoats had already been introduced in 1824.)

Adams's supporters retaliated by the campaign poster known as the Coffin Handbill, listing 18 murders Jackson was supposed to have committed. Those who claim the current election is the dirtiest know little about 1828. An English visitor, shown a school in New England (where Adams was paramount), put questions to the class, including "Who killed Abel?" A child promptly replied "General Jackson, Ma'am." An Adams pamphlet accused Jackson of "trafficking in human flesh," another accused his wife of being a bigamist and adulterer. After seeing it, she took to her bed and died shortly after the election. To his dying day Jackson believed his political enemies had murdered her. On his side, pamphlets accused Adams of fornication, procuring American virgins for the Tsar while serving as ambassador in Russia, and being an alcoholic and sabbath-breaker. A White House inventory listing a billiard-table and a chess-set led to the accusation that Adams had introduced "gambling furniture." (His most curious presidential habit, of taking a daily swim in the Potomac stark naked, went unnoticed.)

Jackson won the popular vote in this first razzmatazz election, 647,276 to 508,064, and the College by a clear majority. His inauguration was followed by a saturnalia in which thousands of his supporters invaded the White House and engaged in a drinking spree. The Spoils System (a new term) was inaugurated by the ejection of Adams's men from public offices, a process called The Massacre of the Innocents....

Geoffrey Nunberg, in Newsday (Oct. 17, 2004):

[Geoffrey Nunberg is the author of "Going Nucular: Language, Politics and Culture in Controversial Times" and a Stanford University linguist.]

The televison commentaries on this year's presidential debates have continued a grand tradition of sporting metaphors that runs back to the first Kennedy-Nixon debate in 1960. "It's Sammy Sosa versus Pedro Martinez." "Nobody hit a home run." "Kerry's got to "cut the ring off and make him fight." "It's only the third quarter." "Sweep!"

But the sporting event that the debates most closely resemble is probably Olympic figure skating - a quadrennial competition that nobody is quite sure how to score unless one of the competitors actually falls down. And when the public does make up its mind about the outcome a few days later, nobody's sure what the judging criteria were, apart from that vague business of who managed to "look presidential," a phrase that came up 244 times in the press stories on the debates indexed on Google News over the past few weeks.

It's no accident that this phrase first became common in the 1970s, when the televised debate was permanently revived after a 16-year lull and the networks first began broadcasting post-debate commentary and spin. "Looking presidential" is like "artistic merit" in figure skating - an imponderable that nobody feels obliged to pin down.

We come to the debates with the knowing cynicism that we bring to the other televised rituals of American political life, like the conventions and the State of the Union speech, attuned to the play of appearances. The commentators dissect every twitch and frown for the impact it might have had on the ordinary folks who will be sloshing it around the next day "at the water-coolers," a nod to the fiction that the pundits themselves play no role in shaping the public reactions.

When a candidate makes a good showing, partisans for the other side are quick to dismiss him as "glib" or "a skillful debater," implying that television makes it easy to manipulate appearances. And if the viewers don't find that condescending, it's because they think of themselves as in on the game.

Critics have always grumbled that the formats turn the confrontations into beauty contests rather than what they call "real debates." Shortly after the Nixon-Kennedy debates, the historian Henry Steele Commager wrote that the televised debate privileges "the glib, the evasive, the dogmatic, the melodramatic" at the expense of "the sincere, the judicious, the sober, the honest." And on PBS recently, presidential historian Michael Beschloss suggested that the ideal forum would be a series of 10 or 12 debates where the candidates could go into each issue in depth.

But it's unlikely that this year's debates left viewers with an appetite for tuning in to seven more, whatever the format, or whether even a whole season of debates would have left viewers with a clearer position on whether we should include China in the negotiations with North Korea.

In fact the debates rarely make for compelling entertainment, whatever you might conclude if you went only by the montages of highlight clips that the networks run as promos for their coverage.

Even the first Nixon-Kennedy debate, which we like to remember as a moment of high drama in American politics, was described the following day in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch as a "stiff and formalized occasion." The Herald-Tribune complained about "pools of platitudes." And in an early foray into sports metaphor, the Buffalo Evening News described the debate as "a cautious sparring between overtrained experts, each very chary of getting within haymaker range of his opponent and each scoring a few light jabs."

This year's debates, too, fell far short of anything you'd be tempted to describe as "gripping" - particularly the last one, where Bob Schieffer had trouble coming up with questions that forced the candidates to depart from their packaged spiels. ("What part does your faith play on your policy decisions?")

Yet however cynical we are about the process, the debates we have do enable voters to take some measure of the candidates. As Northeastern University's Alan Schroeder noted in his history of the presidential debates, "no matter how the deck has been stacked, little arrows of verisimilitude manage to shoot out of the screen."...

It's pointless to ask whether any of that gave voters an insight into the "real John Kerry" or the "real George W. Bush" - it's like asking whether we know the "real Dave Letterman." ("Be yourself," my freshman English instructor once wrote on a composition I'd handed in. "If this is you, be someone else.")

But most of us came away from the debates feeling that the candidates hadn't been able to wholly manipulate the impression we took away with us. After all, we're at least as skillful at watching talk shows as they are at appearing on them.

Nicholas Turse, at tomdispatch.com, a web log of the Nation Institute (Oct. 2004):

[Nicholas Turse is doctoral candidate at the Center for the History & Ethics of Public Health in the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. He writes regularly for Tomdispatch on the military-corporate complex as well as for the Village Voice.]

Even if you never read the comic book or watched the hopelessly low-production-value 1960s cartoon, chances are you've at least seen the image of Captain America -- the slightly ridiculous looking superhero in a form-fitting, star-spangled bodysuit. If you're still hazy on"Cap," he was Steve Rogers, a 4-F weakling during World War II who, through the miracle of"modern science" (a"super soldier serum") became an Axis-smashing powerhouse -- the pinnacle of human physical perfection and the ultimate American fighting-man.

In the 1940s comic, Rogers had taken part in a super-soldier experiment, thanks to the interventions of an Army general and a scientist in a secret government laboratory. He was to be the first of many American super-soldiers, but due to poor note-keeping methods and the efforts of a Nazi assassin, he became the sole recipient of the serum. Today, however, the dream of Captain America turns out to be alive and well -- and lodged in the Pentagon. The U.S. military aims to succeed where those in the four-color comic book world failed. By using high technology and cutting edge biomedicine, the military hopes to create an entire army of Captain Americas -- a fighting force devoid of"Steve Rogers" or any other"Joe Average," and made up instead of super-soldiers whose human-ness has been all but banished.

24-Hour Soldiers

The military has long been interested in creating an always-on, 24-hour fighting man. During the Vietnam War, the Army undertook extensive studies on the effects of sleep deprivation. At the time, however, all the military could offer was copious amounts of amphetamines to keep men wired for combat.

As in the Vietnam era, the military is again stretched thin and, with National Guard recruiting having fallen 12% below goal in the first three quarters of 2004, in need of troops. What better way to forestall future manpower crises than by creating two-for-the-price-of-one soldiers who never need to sleep?

To this end, the Department of Defense's blue-skies research outfit, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), currently has a "Preventing Sleep Deprivation Program." Its aim is to work on ways to enable a pilot"to fly continuously for 30 hours," Green Berets to carry out 48-72 hours of sustained activity, or"advancing ground troops [to] engage in weeks of combat operations with only 3 hours of sleep per night" -- all without suffering from cognitive or psychomotor impairments.

Scientists in the military-industrial-academic complex are hard at work for DARPA on this line of research. At Wake Forest University, for instance, researchers are studying a class of medicines known as"Ampakines" which are thought to be protective against the cognitive deficits ordinarily associated with sleep deprivation. At Columbia University, new imaging technologies are being employed as part of a program to study the"neuro-protective and neuro-regenerative effects" of an anti-oxidant found in cocoa. (In low-tech World War II, they just gave the grunts chocolate bars.) Who's conducting this line of research for DARPA? Why, researchers at the Salk Institute and also at that all-chocolate-all-the-time company Mars Inc. -- yes, the folks who bring you M&M's and Snickers!

At the same time, the Air Force Research Laboratory's Warfighter Fatigue Countermeasure program is looking into a drug known as Modafinil which can reportedly keep people awake for up to 88 hours without sleep; while researchers at the Naval Health Research Center (NHRC), the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center (SPAWAR), the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, and the U.S. Army Aeromedical Research Laboratory, among others, are working on sleep- (or-lack-thereof)-related projects.

Major Morality, You're Demoted. We're Promoting Corporal Punishment!

Sleepless soldiers are all well and good while the fighting goes on; but how does one prevent sleepless, anxiety-filled nights after those missions end? Once upon a time, it seems, most soldiers had a great revulsion against close-quarters killing. During World War II, it has been estimated that as few as 15-20% of American infantry troops actually fired their weapons at the enemy. By the Vietnam years, the military had managed to bring that number up into the 90-95% range! Obviously, the armed forces had found ways to turn American men into more efficient killers. But how to deal with the pesky problems of regret, remorse, and post-traumatic stress disorder?

Well, last year, writing in the Village Voice, Erik Baard raised the specter of the creation of a"guilt-free soldier," noting that researchers from various universities across the U.S. (including Harvard, Columbia, NYU, and UC-Irvine) were working on various methods of fear-inhibition and also memory-numbing by using"propranolol pills… as a means to nip the effects of trauma in the bud." He further reported that at Columbia, the lab of Nobel laureate in medicine Eric Kandel had"discovered the gene behind a fear-inhibiting protein, uncovering a vision of 'fight or flight' at the molecular level." When asked by Baard if he was funded by DARPA, Kandel answered,"No, but you're welcome to call them and tell them about me."

Will DARPA take Kandel up on his tacit offer? It seems only natural that a soldier unburdened by morals, ethics, or remorse would be the military's dream. But for now, DARPA seems fixated on another long-term project -- creating cyborg soldiers -- which might make an anti-morality morning-after (combat) pill superfluous.

Remote-Controlled soldiers?

As noted recently in the pages of the New Yorker, searching for perks to retain troops, the military is offering free cosmetic surgery (funded by taxpayer dollars) to"[a]nyone wearing a uniform." So right now "bigger breasts" are the type of implants the U.S. military is specializing in. (Military doctors performed 496 breast enlargements between 2000 and 2003.) However, if DARPA scientists have their way, the implants du jour of the future may be the product of the"Brain Machine Interface Program" which seeks"new high-density interconnects for brain machine interfaces that will allow [researchers] to monitor the brain patterns associated with a wide variety of behaviors and activities relevant to DoD [the Department of Defense]."

Monkeys, with electrodes implanted in their brains, have already been taught to use thought-power to do such things as move a robotic arm. But why stop there? A few years back, DARPA scientists succeeded in creating a "ratbot" --a living, breathing rat with electrodes implanted in its brain that could be controlled using a laptop computer. Today, DARPA researchers, not exactly heading up the evolutionary scale but evidently proceeding toward larger sized natural fighting machines, are working on a remote-controlled shark. And how long will it be until some researcher gets the bright idea of a remote-controlled soldier; short-circuiting free will altogether? The technology isn't there yet, but what happens when it is?

DARPA already has all sorts of programs designed to use high-tech means to prevent humans from"becoming the weakest link in the U.S. military." Take the"Neovision Program" whose goal is"using synthetic materials for a retinal prosthesis to enable signal transduction at the nerve/retina interface"; that is, creating devices to technologically-enhance or even re-conceptualize human vision as we know it. Or how about the Biologically Inspired Multifunctional Dynamic Robotics (BIODYNOTICS) Program, which aims to develop"robotic capabilities," inspired by biology –such as the movements of arms and legs--"for national security applications."

Foodless Fighters? Water-free Warriors?

But what good is an always-on, morals-free cyborg soldier if s/he's caught in the classic quagmire of having recurring desires to eat and drink which simply must be met? How pathetically human! Not to worry. Today's soldiers might complain about choking down MREs (Meals Ready to Eat) but, if all goes well, tomorrow's might not have such worries.

Typical adults require about 1500-2000 calories per day, but Special Forces' troops may require as many as 6,000-8,000 calories per day while in the field. Taking time to eat, however, cuts into time that could be spent identifying targets or killing people, so DARPA's"Peak Soldier Performance Program" is investigating ways of"optimizing metabolic performance" to achieve "metabolic dominance" and so to allow future soldiers to operate at" continuous peak physical performance and cognitive function for 3 to 5 days, 24 hours per day, without the need for calories."

At the same time, the DARPA crew has instituted a "Water Harvesting Program" which seeks to"eliminate at least 50 percent of the minimum daily water supply requirement (7qts/day) of the Special Forces, Marine Expeditionary Units, and Army Medium-Weight Brigades" through initiatives such as deriving"water from air."

And when it comes to their meals, perhaps someday soldiers will be able forgo water altogether for long periods of time thanks to the efforts of the Combat Feeding Directorate of the US Army Soldier Systems Center in Natick, Massachusetts. Yes, the lab that created the"indestructible sandwich" (which boasts a three year shelf life) has now come up with a dried-food ration that troops can hydrate by urinating on it. And you thought military food was piss-poor to begin with!

Super-Suits: Can I Get This in Star-Spangled Spandex?

What can you say about Captain America's outfit? While certainly distinctive, his red, white, and blue threads were always a bit light on function. So what can we expect for the real Captain Americas of the future? They won't be clad in jingoistic jumpsuits. The Army's Natick Soldier Systems Center is currently supervising a seven-year, $250 million"Future Force Warrior" program, set to be rolled out in 2010, which will outfit soldiers with new, lighter body armor, an on-board computer,"e-textile" clothing (with wiring for computer systems woven into it), and a helmet with built-in night-vision, a computer screen monocle, and bone-conduction microphones. Add a decade onto the Future Force Warrior and the military aims to be rolling out "The Vision 2020 Future Warrior system," an all-black, sci-fi, storm-trooper outfit that looks like it came from a B-movie prop trailer. But both may seem so last year before they ever have a chance to encase a military body!

Earlier this year, Dr. Steven G. Wax, the director of DARPA's Defense Sciences Office (DSO), addressed members of the academic, corporate, and military communities and told them that the mech-suit worn by Sigourney Weaver in the movie Alien was fast becoming a reality. While various clunky exoskeletons have been produced since the 1960s, Wax indicated that"breakthroughs in structures, actuators and power generation -- with a bit of help from advanced microelectronics" left DARPA capable of creating a workable"external structure that can move unobtrusively with a soldier and still carry more than 100 pounds with no effort by the wearer." And through its"Exoskeletons for Human Performance Augmentation" program, DARPA claims to be en route to creating even more advanced"self-powered, controlled, and wearable exoskeleton devices and/or machines" specifically designed, of course, to"increase the lethality" of U.S. soldiers.

Food for Thought

In a world where many still lack access to adequate clothing, despite it being decreed a basic human right in 1948, DARPA is pouring massive sums into building costly robotic suits. In a world where 800 million people suffer from malnutrition and 1 billion lack access to potable water, food and water are only made"sexy" when DARPA researchers figure out how a few (well armed) people in the global North can do without them on military missions (generally in the global South). There's no DARPA-esque organization involved in actually solving the most pressing problems in the world. And yes, while some in the developing world could benefit from possible DARPA spin-off, trickle-down innovations like futuristic prosthetic limbs, many, many more could benefit from low-cost, low-tech public health initiatives. Of course, many would have no need for high-tech prosthetics if, for so many years, the U.S. military hadn't pumped so much money into weapons, especially landmine research and production. (In Vietnam, for instance, as many as 3 million landmines and"800,000 tons of war-era ordnance" may still lie in the ground.)

DARPA's chunk of the vast Pentagon budget is a cool $3 billion, a sizeable hunk of which is now being devoted to creating real-life Captain Americas or, more accurately Captain DARPAmericas. Like so many DARPA projects, the agency's efforts to craft the super-soldiers of tomorrow typify the ultimate in sci-fi thinking. What was once the stuff of comic books and futuristic movie serials is now assumed to be America's military future.

In reality, however, most DARPA projects fail to meet their ultimate goals. During the Vietnam War, massive amounts of money, firepower, and high-tech weaponry proved unable to stamp out an enemy that regularly used punji sticks (sharpened bamboo) as a weapon. Today in Iraq, billions upon billions of dollars in military and intelligence spending for satellites, state-of-the-art surveillance devices, stealth bombers, fighter jets, tanks, Bradley Fighting Vehicles, Humvees, heavy weapons, night-vision devices, high tech drones, experimental weaponry and all the trappings of Technowar, though capable of killing large numbers of people, are again unable to stop resistance fighters who lack heavy armor, airpower, spy satellites, body armor, or high-tech gear and fight with AK-47s -- a rifle designed in the 1940s -- pickup trucks, and bombs detonated by garage-door openers. Captain DARPAmerica -- an always on, never hungry or thirsty, morality-free, remote-controlled soldier-- is a frightening prospect; but odds are, even if such DARPA projects pan out, the high-tech super-soldier of our future will fail too, due to underlying conceptual flaws and the ceaseless hubris of U.S. military planners that typified the American experience in Vietnam and continues to do so in today's war in Iraq.

Further, DARPA imagines the future through the lens of the present. Its projects are largely typified, at their core, by the very opposite of blue-sky thinking, being mired in the mindset and premises of today (or even yesterday). Where Pentagon seers envision an Army of unstoppable comic-book heroes, they may well find over-wrought, strung-out soldiers, suffering from the still unknown side-effects that are sure to come from interfering with basic human functions like sleeping and eating. They will be clad in temperamental gear that will prove vulnerable to yet undeveloped, but sure to be cheap, crude, and effective jamming devices and counter-measures. Odds are, the Pentagon would be better off investing in Captain America outfits. Not only would it be infinitely cheaper, but who's gonna mess with a platoon clad in star-spangled spandex?