Month: January 2004

I shall be brief:

1. John Edwards is Clinton in ’92 — charismatic Southern, moderate, handsome, populist — but without “bimbo eruptions.” I’ll be the last to say it: Edwards is the Democrat most likely to beat Bush. (But consider: Edwards is so good on his feet, anything less than total victory in a debate with Bush will be considered as “below expectations.”)

2. Richard Cheney is Spiro Agnew. It’s as much an image problem as anything else.* Take another look at his picture with Pope John Paul, for instance. Were this a Hollywood movie, would there be any doubt that Cheney is a “bad man”?

3. George Bush needs to mimic Ronald Reagan even more. For example, look again at how Bush enters a room to speak. Bush has the quick, bent forward stride of someone one step shy of a public-speaking phobia. Reagan, on the other hand, was completely at ease — a natural. C’mon, George: you’re the leader of the free world. Slow down.

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There’s a long, proud tradition of really negative campaigning in the final hours before a primary–anonymous flyers attacking the other candidates, that sort of thing. My sense is that every campaign does it (including my preferred candidate and Handsome Larry*, who’s (accurately) perceived to have run the most positive campaign.) Every campaign is “shocked” at their rivals’ dirty tricks and indignantly denies its own–until they’re caught, in which case it’s portrayed, truly or falsely, as a one-time mistake by an overzealous volunteer.

But there’s negative campaigning, and there’s negative campaigning. These had better be isolated incidents.

1. From an AP story:

For example, Carson said, an e-mail that proposes to be from campaign manager Joe Trippi asks for interns, but then says because of tight sleeping headquarters, homosexuals are not accepted.

Frances Gehling, a Dean volunteer, said she received a phone call January 16 from a person who identified herself as a Londonderry, N.H., resident who worked for the local Kerry campaign. After Gehling said she supported Dean, the caller asked if it bothered Gehling “that Dean waffles on the issues.”

The caller then asked Gehling about Dean’s statement that “we will learn how to talk about Jesus” when he campaigns in the South. “She asked how someone who is married to a Jew and raising Jewish children can have Christian values,” Gehring said when contacted by The Associated Press.

2. There have been reports that people were calling voters in the middle of the night–4.a.m., say–in New Hampshire pretending to be from the Dean campaign. Atrios summarizes them here.

3. There were rumors on Kos of attacks on Dean’s wife and other, even nastier push polls (would it change your opinion on Dean to know that he was an abortitionist, his history of spousal abuse, etc.) in Iowa, and a recording of a Kerry volunteer calling Dean an “environmental racist.” I didn’t take these very seriously at the time, but these reports have a cumulative effect.

If these reports are true (and I think most are, except maybe the rumors about the abortionist/spousal abuse push polls, which are not well sourced and so ridiculously sleazy that I find them hard to believe), and if they are an organized effort rather than a few wacko volunteers (which is much less clear) we still don’t know who’s responsible. It could be any Democratic candidate, or even a Republican trying to sow discord. My knee jerk reaction and that of many Dean supporters, though, was “it’s probably the Kerry campaign.” I’m sure that’s partly sour grapes, but it’s also partly Occam’s razor. Most of the stories that are confirmed involve the Kerry campaign; Kerry participated in both Iowa and NH; and he was the one most likely to gain if Dean was damaged.

In any case, it needs to stop.

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One of the things that bothered me most about David Brooks’ ridiculous assertions about “neocon” being a code word for “Jew” is that it makes it harder to point out true code words. And if you don’t believe they exist, read this passage from a recent National Review article.

For years, the far Left has had its own rhetoric, in which certain words carry special meanings to those “in the know.” Now, conservatives have their own way of conveying messages that have unique significance for them. In the State of the Union address, Christians heard special messages that were conveyed with skillfully placed words. For believers, the “sanctity” of marriage is rooted in those biblical principles that sustain marriage; defining marriage through its “moral tradition” carries specific ramifications in terms of Judeo-Christian values and beliefs.

Two comments:
1. Of course, pretending that code words used to be the sole province of the far Left-with-a-capital-L is absurd. “States rights” and “our Southern way of life” are the two examples that immediately come to my mind.*

2. “Judeo-Christian values and beliefs”, huh? I appreciate it that Judaism has made it to the in-club of religions. But considering that most of the Boston-area Jewish community recently “voted overwhelmingly to endorse same-sex marriage,” and that
Reform Judaism (the largest Jewish denomination in the U.S.) “determined in 2000 that gay unions were ‘worthy of affirmation through appropriate Jewish ritual.'”….I wish that Ms. Crouse and her pals would leave “Judeo” out of it.

(And while we’re on this topic, isn’t Concerned Women for America itself due for a name change?)

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