Monday - October 18, 2004

The Desperation Circus: Act I

After reading about the voter fraud already starting in Florida and Ohio, I was enraged. Then I got today’s Opinion Journal from James Taranto in my e-mail box and one thing leapt out at me. Taranto lists the attacks Kerry & Co. have been mounting lately and draws the conclusion that the Democraps are getting desperate. I’ll let him tell you about it ....

Fifteen days to go, and much of John Kerry’s “debate bounce” has faded away. RealClearPolitics’ “poll average” gives President Bush a 3.6% lead, 48.8% to 45.2%, with Ralph Nader grabbing 1.7%. Without Nader, Bush picks up 0.2%, giving him a 3.8% lead.

This is close enough that Republicans are in no position to get cocky, but with every poll now showing a Bush lead (except Time without Nader and Zogby with, which both have a tie), the Kerry camp has reason to be nervous. Their man did about as well as could be expected in the debates, and still he trails. An Agence France-Presse photo suggests the Kerry campaign is a “dead end.” We wouldn’t go that far--but with no more debates, what can Kerry do to come back? Blogger Rodger Morrow suggests that he is being forced to resort to a “Hail Mary” approach--attempting to score via a series of long passes that have little chance of connecting:

In the past 10 days or so, the Kedwards campaign has:

- Accused the Bush administration of planning to reinstitute a military draft.

- Recycled the “no blood for oil” canard of the looney left.

- Alleged that the Bush administration is somehow in the pocket of the Saudi royal family.

- Told voters that, if they elect John Kerry, “people like Christopher Reeve are going to walk, get up out of that wheelchair and walk again.”

- Suggested that President Bush was planning a “January surprise” to privatize Social Security.

- Advised Democratic campaign workers to launch a “pre-emptive strike” charging voter “intimidation” on election day even if no evidence exists.

- Warned Florida voters that Republicans are “trying to keep people from voting.”

- Blamed the flu vaccine shortage on President Bush.

- Twice called attention to the fact that Mary Cheney is a lesbian.

If you didn’t know better, you might think they were getting desperate. (emphasis mine)

Of course, the problem with a Hail Mary pass is that there’s always the danger of being intercepted, which is what appears to have happened with the Mary Cheney Hail Mary. On the surface, it was actually a very clever play, a way of gay-baiting while also appealing to gays (who saw it as a way of exposing what they see as Republican cruelty or hypocrisy on same-sex marriage).

The problem for Kerry is that a lot more Americans have children than have strong feelings about homosexuality one way or the other. People tend to be very protective of their own families and sympathetic to the protective instincts of others. It was the invasion of the Cheney family’s privacy, not anything having to do with homosexuality per se, that got Kerry in trouble.

Now, it’s true that Miss Cheney’s sexual orientation was not a secret, and that her father had talked about it--but there’s a big difference between talking about your own family (whether for political gain or not) and talking about someone else’s in order to harm him politically. The Clintons understood this very well and made good use of Hillary in defending Bill from his scandals--from “60 Minutes” in 1992 to the “vast right-wing conspiracy” interview in 1998.

In our view, Hillary’s own political ambitions made the Clinton marriage “fair game” to a much greater degree than Mary Cheney is, but we’d venture to say most Americans were more sympathetic to Hillary’s privacy than we were. Tellingly, Robert Novak reports that “the only Kerry aide on the [campaign] plane who wanted the senator to quickly issue an apology for any perceived insult was senior adviser Mike McCurry, the former Clinton spokesman who is a calm, cool voice among the overheated Kerryites.” In any case, it’s hard to imagine Bill Clinton ever being graceless enough to say such a thing in the first place, let alone to insist he was right to do so.

Posted by The Skipper     on 10/18/2004 at 05:39 PM   
Filed Under: • Democrats-Liberals-Moonbat Leftists •  
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