Politically Deaf & Dumb
It’s amazing the nuggets the aforementioned American Spectator gets its hands on. Consider this one.
It seems that Kerry’s campaign advisors have actually noticed that their candidates’ economic gimmick – “A Tale of Two Americas” – is going over like a fart in church. So they want to drop it in favor of the unifying theme Barack Obama proclaimed two weeks ago.
But there’s a catch. “The problem is Edwards loves [the two America spiel]. Kerry loves it. And the media really buys into it and promotes it for us. We just don't think the voters buy it."
So what you have here is a Democrat ticket that is increasingly, if not utterly, politically tone-deaf, and too arrogant to acknowledge that the tune they enjoy so much inside the left-wing echo chamber might not be getting over in proverbial Peoria, where this election will be decided.
But it gets better. Edwards, at least, has been willing to “Obamasize” his rhetoric to a degree, but only in backwater venues (like Lawrence, KS) where he thinks he can get away with it without his partisan media friends overhearing him. Kind of like trying to hide a forehead zit on the day of the junior prom.
Their clumsy reaction to the Swift Vet affair is similar. The “Christmas in Cambodia” lie was run past Mr. French the other day, and the response from his inner circle was a terse “It’s being handled.” Yeah, it’s being handled, alright – badly, so much so that they’ve painted themselves into a corner, particularly with the threat to sue TV stations and perhaps the Swifties themselves.
I mean, hello, can we talk “free speech” here? Can you imagine what the reaction would have been if the Bush White House had sent the hounds after any of the phalanx of hard-left 527s that have been mauling the President for what seems like forever? Heck, they’ve gotten that reaction anyway, even though the Mooresque assaults have continued, unfettered and unabated. And what about the “you’re attacking veterans” angle that Kerry has used for years whenever anybody tried to call him on his Vietnam embellishments? Now he’s going to try and ruin over two hundred and fifty Vietnam vets, who served at least as honorably as he did, if not far more so, just because they won’t toe the “band of brothers” line that has served him so cynically well over the course of a political career he is still loathe to discuss? And remember that if he were to follow through on these threatened lawsuits, that would involve discovery and sworn depositions under oath, and that means releasing the military records he is still refusing to relinquish to this day.
This would be a train wreck of a distraction, not to mention a public relations disaster. And in the end it would, presumably, completely expose the “I served in Vietnam” bio that is the sole foundation of his candidacy. Is it any wonder that the Bushies and RNC aren’t touching this with a ten-foot pole? Why should they stick their oars in and provide Gomer with a means of escape when he’s doing a splendid job of imploding all on his own?
This, my Dem friends, is what you get for setting up your nominating process to stampede toward one candidate almost before your New Year’s hangovers have worn off. You were all set to warp straight into the sun on the Howie Dean express when some fraying cord of sanity held; so you all jumped off of Dean’s kamikaze run en masse and onto the yacht John Kerry instead and simply resumed your previous course at a more stately pace. Only your “cap’n” is trying to sail in all directions at once, and refuses to acknowledge that he might be sailing sunward after all. So the yacht is tumbling end over end, adrift, and now you’re in close-quarter battle with a swarm of swift boats and deflector shields are buckling and your “cap’n” is threatening to use the auto-destruct to take the enemy out, only he’s telling you that…”It’s being handled.”
An actually competitive primary season vets things like this so that they don’t become millstones in the general campaign. But you thought that the Boston Balker was “electable,” based mostly, if not entirely, on the contrast with Dr. Demented. And now the “Anybody But Bush” machine has started going “punkety-punkety-punkety,” with what promises to be a climactic GOP convention looming on the near horizon.
Hey, I know what I wrote above. Maybe none of the above will matter after all.
But if it does, something tells me it’s going to matter an awful lot.
UPDATE: According to Fabrizio McLaughlin & Associates (FMA), a Republican polling and strategic consulting firm based in Alexandria, VA, the Swifties’ TV ad and Unfit for Command has produced a fifteen-point shift away from Senator Kerry among undecided voters in nineteen battleground states. That could be worth as much as a point and a half in the overall popular vote.
The Democrats would be doing themselves a huge favor to back off their bullying before they dig themselves into a hole they can’t drag their candidate out of. They really would.
It seems that Kerry’s campaign advisors have actually noticed that their candidates’ economic gimmick – “A Tale of Two Americas” – is going over like a fart in church. So they want to drop it in favor of the unifying theme Barack Obama proclaimed two weeks ago.
But there’s a catch. “The problem is Edwards loves [the two America spiel]. Kerry loves it. And the media really buys into it and promotes it for us. We just don't think the voters buy it."
So what you have here is a Democrat ticket that is increasingly, if not utterly, politically tone-deaf, and too arrogant to acknowledge that the tune they enjoy so much inside the left-wing echo chamber might not be getting over in proverbial Peoria, where this election will be decided.
But it gets better. Edwards, at least, has been willing to “Obamasize” his rhetoric to a degree, but only in backwater venues (like Lawrence, KS) where he thinks he can get away with it without his partisan media friends overhearing him. Kind of like trying to hide a forehead zit on the day of the junior prom.
Their clumsy reaction to the Swift Vet affair is similar. The “Christmas in Cambodia” lie was run past Mr. French the other day, and the response from his inner circle was a terse “It’s being handled.” Yeah, it’s being handled, alright – badly, so much so that they’ve painted themselves into a corner, particularly with the threat to sue TV stations and perhaps the Swifties themselves.
I mean, hello, can we talk “free speech” here? Can you imagine what the reaction would have been if the Bush White House had sent the hounds after any of the phalanx of hard-left 527s that have been mauling the President for what seems like forever? Heck, they’ve gotten that reaction anyway, even though the Mooresque assaults have continued, unfettered and unabated. And what about the “you’re attacking veterans” angle that Kerry has used for years whenever anybody tried to call him on his Vietnam embellishments? Now he’s going to try and ruin over two hundred and fifty Vietnam vets, who served at least as honorably as he did, if not far more so, just because they won’t toe the “band of brothers” line that has served him so cynically well over the course of a political career he is still loathe to discuss? And remember that if he were to follow through on these threatened lawsuits, that would involve discovery and sworn depositions under oath, and that means releasing the military records he is still refusing to relinquish to this day.
This would be a train wreck of a distraction, not to mention a public relations disaster. And in the end it would, presumably, completely expose the “I served in Vietnam” bio that is the sole foundation of his candidacy. Is it any wonder that the Bushies and RNC aren’t touching this with a ten-foot pole? Why should they stick their oars in and provide Gomer with a means of escape when he’s doing a splendid job of imploding all on his own?
This, my Dem friends, is what you get for setting up your nominating process to stampede toward one candidate almost before your New Year’s hangovers have worn off. You were all set to warp straight into the sun on the Howie Dean express when some fraying cord of sanity held; so you all jumped off of Dean’s kamikaze run en masse and onto the yacht John Kerry instead and simply resumed your previous course at a more stately pace. Only your “cap’n” is trying to sail in all directions at once, and refuses to acknowledge that he might be sailing sunward after all. So the yacht is tumbling end over end, adrift, and now you’re in close-quarter battle with a swarm of swift boats and deflector shields are buckling and your “cap’n” is threatening to use the auto-destruct to take the enemy out, only he’s telling you that…”It’s being handled.”
An actually competitive primary season vets things like this so that they don’t become millstones in the general campaign. But you thought that the Boston Balker was “electable,” based mostly, if not entirely, on the contrast with Dr. Demented. And now the “Anybody But Bush” machine has started going “punkety-punkety-punkety,” with what promises to be a climactic GOP convention looming on the near horizon.
Hey, I know what I wrote above. Maybe none of the above will matter after all.
But if it does, something tells me it’s going to matter an awful lot.
UPDATE: According to Fabrizio McLaughlin & Associates (FMA), a Republican polling and strategic consulting firm based in Alexandria, VA, the Swifties’ TV ad and Unfit for Command has produced a fifteen-point shift away from Senator Kerry among undecided voters in nineteen battleground states. That could be worth as much as a point and a half in the overall popular vote.
The Democrats would be doing themselves a huge favor to back off their bullying before they dig themselves into a hole they can’t drag their candidate out of. They really would.
posted by JASmius at 12:38 PM
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