Quantum Windbag
Gold Member
- May 9, 2010
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I am posting this because I hope that a few of the people who have a knee jerk response to "racially coded language" will realize where the problem actually lies. My guess is the usual suspects will miss the point.
Let’s Get This Party Started | Power Line
As the GOP convention gets under way a day late today, Team Obama must be truly worried about things, if Chris Matthews unhinged behavior over the last 36 hours is any indication. But the egregious Matthews is just one small symptom of a larger asymmetry between the two parties.
The Team Obama theory was that they could destroy Romney over the summer with vicious attacks calling him a tax cheat, a murderer, and even a carcinogenic agent. (Get ready for a nasty whisper campaign against Romneys religion before this is over.) The Left thinks they are merely borrowing the Republican tactic of Swift-boating, or, even better, the Willie Horton card (aka, the maxed-out race card). The Left considered both the Swift boat attack that helped do in John Kerry in 2004, and the Willie Horton ad in 1988 that helped do in Michael Dukakis, to be below-the-belt, out-of-bounds, unfair, etc. Matthews brought up both Ronald Reagan and the welfare queen story again with Newt Gingrich, who throws it back in his face quite effectively. And liberals conveniently forget that the person who first brought up Willie Horton against Dukakis in 1998 was Al Gore in the New York primary.) Hence, theres no reason why Democrats shouldnt use made-up, below-the-belt attacks on Romney now. And yet after all this Romney is dead even with Obama. Not the place Team Obama expected to be.
The Left never understoodstill doesntwhy both the Swift boat attack on Kerry and the Willie Horton furlough had such traction with Americans, and why they were no mere mud slinging. The Horton ad is especially instructive. It has had a long shelf-life. In 1990, Sam Donaldson interviewed Horton on ABCs Prime Time Live, and concluded his interview with the question: If [Bush campaign manager] Lee Atwater should walk through that door tomorrow and say, Mr. Horton, I think I did you wrong, would you forgive him? This kind of thinking, George Will noted at the time, encourages in the Democrats the soothing belief that their partys problems are in the nuts and bolts of the machinery and not in the partys mind. Pathetic. Likewise, the Swift boat attack exposed the hypocrisy of an anti-war hero trying to make himself into a war hero. Most people wont fall for that. The point is: both the Swift boat attack on Kerry, and the Willie Horton ad, exposed weak spots in liberalism that liberals refuse to confront, while the simple mid-slinging against Romney, unconnected to larger issues, is having limited effect. (Back in 1988, the only establishment figure person who dissented from the liberal line was the Washington Posts Meg Greenfield, who wrote of the Horton issue that Many Democrats seem unwilling or unable to think about violent crime as a matter of public policy.)
Let’s Get This Party Started | Power Line