Shades of Madness

Stuck, that is, with two choices.

One is the path of Deaniacal madness, being pushed by pretty much the entire Democratic Party.

Susan Estrich:

You have to fight fire with fire, mud with mud, dirt with dirt.

The trouble with Democrats, traditionally, is that we're not mean enough. Dukakis wasn't. I wasn't. I don't particularly like destroying people. I got into politics because of issues, not anger. But too much is at stake to play by Dukakis rules, and lose again.

That is the conclusion Democrats have reached. So watch out. Millions of dollars will be on the table. And there are plenty of choices for what to spend it on.

I'm not promising pretty.

What will it be?

Will it be the three, or is it four or five, drunken driving arrests that Bush and Cheney, the two most powerful men in the world, managed to rack up? (Bush's Texas record has been sealed. Now why would that be? Who seals a perfect driving record?)

After Vietnam, nothing is ancient history, and Cheney is still drinking. What their records suggest is not only a serious problem with alcoholism, which Bush but not Cheney has acknowledged, but also an even more serious problem of judgment. Could Dick Cheney get a license to drive a school bus with his record of drunken driving? (I can see the ad now.) A job at a nuclear power plant? Is any alcoholic ever really cured? So why put him in the most stressful job in the world, with a war going south, a thousand Americans already dead and control of weapons capable of destroying the world at his fingertips.

It has been said that in the worst of times, Kissinger gave orders to the military not to obey Nixon if he ordered a first strike. What if Bush were to fall off the wagon? Then what? Has America really faced the fact that we have an alcoholic as our President?

Joe Klein:

After a week of gut-wound assaults on his character, Kerry finally fired back on Thursday night, assailing Bush and Cheney for having avoided service in Vietnam and for having "misled" us into Iraq. The latter may be an exaggeration, but after the G.O.P. assault, Kerry has a right to exaggerate with impunity. Indeed, if he hopes to win, Kerry will have to do much more of that.

If I didn't know how much most Democrats personally loathe George W. Bush, I'd think they were trying to carry out a mercy killing of a candidacy that threatens to bury their party for a generation. As it is, it has all the appearance of a political Sampson complex, as if to say, "If we're going down, we're taking all you bastards down with us."

The interesting, all but lone, voice in the wilderness this past weekend came from, of all people, Bill Clinton.

Maybe lying in a hospital bed facing potentially life-threatening heart bypass surgery (which, according to reports today, he happily survived with flying colors - I offer my hopes and prayers for him and his family for a speedy and full recovery) forced a more sober and mature perspective on him, or perhaps he just thought, on what might be death's door, to burnish his "responsible elder statesman" image now that his advice was most likely too late to save Lurch's election chances. But Mr. Bill actually gave Mr. French some sound counsel (and, let it be reiterated, the very same advice I publicly dispensed to the Dem presidential field a full year ago).

In an expansive conversation, Mr. Clinton, who is awaiting heart surgery, told Mr. Kerry that he should move away from talking about Vietnam, which had been the central theme of his candidacy, and focus instead on drawing contrasts with President Bush on job creation and health care policies, officials with knowledge of the conversation said...

The telephone conversation, which was described as detailed and expansive, with Mr. Kerry doing more listening than talking, also included Mr. Lockhart, who joined Mr. Kerry's campaign as a senior adviser about two weeks ago. Mr. Lockhart declined to comment on the conversation.

You have to wonder why Clinton would be devoting any thought to something as comparatively insignificant as someone else's political campaign at a time like that. I guess he really does eat, drink, sleep, and you-know-what this stuff. Maybe that's what got him there.

Still, it says something that Kerry actually shut up and listened for any amount of time at all. Of course, this could have been a "Torricelli" type conversation too, so, in the absence of Joe Lockhart's "no comment," it's difficult to really say.

But the pull of Deania, and Kerry's ingrained compulsion to equivocate, may be too much for him to resist:

People close to Mr. Kerry said he was receptive to the counsel and was moving to widen his circle of advisers in the face of mounting concern among prominent Democrats about the potency of Mr. Bush's campaign...Even so, some of Mr. Kerry's aides insisted that their seeking help from Mr. Clinton was not a reflection of flaws in their campaign.

Oh, yeah, that's just what Lurch needs, still more cooks to stir the broth.

And, sure enough, the Kennedyites that were supposedly headed out of the Kerry campaign (Cahill, Shrum, Devine) are instead still on board, and reportedly actually occupy one side of the campaign's DC office suite with the imported Clintonoids on the other side.

Such mismatched, inbred confusion leads to boners like this one:

Tad Devine, Senator John Kerry’s senior advisor, told the Washington Times that he does not think that the Swift Boat veterans’ ads, which attacked Kerry's Vietnam War record, have hurt the campaign.

“Fundamentally, I don’t think they reshaped the race at all," Devine said. "If they did, the President would be 10 points ahead, not in a dead-heat horse race."

Time: Bush 52, Kerry 41

Newsweek: Bush 54, Kerry 43

I guess Devine was right in a sense - the President isn't ten points ahead.

Meanwhile, CBS News is reporting that running mate Opie Edwards was apparently taken aback by the hot Kerry rhetoric Thursday night. And Fox News just showed a labor union member at a Kerry rally, screaming at the top of his lungs into a microphone that "Bush and Cheney were dodging the draft."

"Whom gods destroy..."