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Friday, June 06, 2008

Politics and Strange Bedfellows
Posted by Jill | 6:26 AM
As jarring as it was to see Larry Johnson, whom many of us held up as a hero for his defense of Valerie Plame against the criminals of the Bush Administration, holding up the likes of Catholic League head Bill Donohue as his BFF because Donohue's outrage at Father Pfleger's ranting at Trinity United were useful to his Nominate Hillary campaign, it's even more jarring to watch conservative icon Richard Viguerie tell Republicans that Barack Obama isn't the real problem for them, that they should look in the mirror:

Are we supposed to be scared of Democrats as big spenders? The Bush administration and congressional Republicans topped Democratic spending on every front. Even excluding the “War on Terror,” Republicans have busted the budget.

The Democrats are going to raise our taxes? No doubt they will, but, because of the Republicans’ massive deficits, our children and grandchildren are going to be crushed by tax hikes or hyperinflation.

The Democrats are corrupt miscreants? Compared to the Bridge to Nowhere-planning, bribe-taking, page-trolling Republicans?

How about, as Bob Dole once put it, the threat of sending our youth off to “Democrat Wars”?

Never mind.

As it becomes more and more clear that the Republicans have nothing to run on, the campaign will get nastier and more personal, centered on Obama. As the real Halloween approaches, it will get worse and then continue until Election Day.

[snip]

To be sure, Obama has to define himself in positive tones before the Republicans succeed in defining him as a secret Muslim agent who’s going to sell us to terrorists. But he has by far the best campaign organization I’ve seen this year, and if, with much of the media in his pocket, they can’t get his message out, they deserve to lose.

Negative campaigning is not the culprit. The job in any campaign, Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative, is to stress your positives and just as strongly stress your opponent’s negatives. We’ve had negative campaigning in America since Colonial days, and it works. That’s why it doesn’t go away despite the sermons from the “good government” crowd.

No, the culprit is not negative campaigning, but rather, campaigning without ideas that are arguably better than your opponent’s, and relying instead on bogeyman portrayals.

McCain has been the victim of bogeyman campaigning himself, and I know him to be an honorable man who doesn’t want to win that way. The problem is that McCain doesn’t have a coherent set of ideas with which he can simultaneously fire up the conservative base and attract independents. He’s a part-time liberal in conservative clothing. Conservatives aren’t fooled by that, and liberals aren’t going to vote for a part-time liberal when they have a very persuasive full-time liberal to vote for.

Republicans on the Hill have no message of what they are for, what their principles are or how they would govern. They can’t even agree to oppose big-government spending through earmarks.

“The lesser of two evils” is not a governing philosophy. Yet Republicans repeatedly try to seduce conservatives with it. That strategy didn’t work in 1948, 1960, 1974, 1976, 1992 or 2006 — and it won’t work in 2008.

Obama isn’t a goblin, nor Pelosi a witch, but the Republican majority of the ‘90s and 2000s is Humpty Dumpty, prostrate and shattered.


I have no idea how I got on Viguerie's e-mail list, just as I have no idea how I got on the mailing list of that nutball who sends around e-mails that play like the K-Tel Nostalgia Version of Clinton Scandals and Conspiracies of the 1990's. But whereas the latter go in the trash where they belong, Viguerie is occasionally worth noting. That said, you'll notice that this is the first time I've ever quoted from anything he's written, because I believe that this kind of "The enemy of my enemy is my friend" politics, like the kind Larry Johnson has been practicing in this primary season, is a dangerous game that always comes back to bite you in the ass. Viguerie is no friend to progressives; what he's blasting here is the pocket-stuffing and spending and warmongering of the last eight years of Republican domination of our government. It isn't that Viguerie wants a progressive nation, he just believes conservatives in Washington have lost their way.

We can applaud this piece to the extent that it helps Barack Obama, but we can't fool ourselves -- what Viguerie writes is nothing but a warning of what we face if the right ever again succeeds in getting its act together.

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1 Comments:
Anonymous Anonymous said...
Another unlikely topic in this same vein:

The likelihood for "goon squads" and agents provocateur from the Neoconservative element weird and unwholesome studying the ongoing chaos and disorder in Zimbabwe for effective ways to disrupt the elections--and then "officially" pin blame on the Radical Left while the real perps get off scot-free in some offshore "safe harbor" with substantial remittances conditional on their silence.
6/6/08, 12:57 PM  
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