Tag: Campaign 2008

Hillary Clinton lambasted Pres. George W. Bush in her first Iowa campaign ad, saying he didn’t care about working class Americans or even returning veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan. The White House walked right into the trap, calling it “outrageous,” “absurd” and “unconscionable” — and thus giving the story legs in the corporate media, which has led to hundreds of free airings of the spot and its exposure to millions of voters outside its paid run in Iowa.

Americans from all walks of life across our country may be invisible to this President, but they’re not invisible to me and they won’t be invisible to the next President of the United States

It also gave Clinton an opening to keep the story alive into another news cycle:

“Apparently I’ve struck a nerve,” Clinton said in response to the White House attack. “I will keep saying it because I believe it.”

At TPM Cafe, M.J. Rosenberg recalls a similar cicrumstance from 40 years ago in which the Lyndon Johnson White House similarly helped boost the campaign of Richard Nixon — whose career appeared to be over after he lost a bid for California governor on the heels of losing the presidency to Kennedy in 1960:

[The] unpopular president from Texas, LBJ, did Nixon a favor. After Nixon criticized Johnson’s war strategy, Johnson, during a televised press conference, lost it.

He blasted Nixon, calling him a “chronic campaigner, whose only concern was picking up a few votes.

The Nixon camp could not believe their luck. They had succeeded in getting under LBJ’s skin. By responding to Nixon’s attack as he did, LBJ elevated Nixon to the Presidential level, right where Nixon needed to be. He was, of course, elected in 1968.

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Paging Mr. Orwell: Rudolph Giuliani may be a liberal on social issues but when it comes to his views on the authority of the government to regulate the lives of its citizens, he is 100 percent conservative.

During his tenure as mayor, Giuliani was in a constant struggle to impose authoritarian rule onto a city known for its liberal, non-conformist culture. At one point, things grew so contentious that America’s Mayor declared it illegal to criticize Himself.

That came as no surprise to locals. For one thing, in March 1994, early in his first year as mayor, he laid out his views on the supremacy of the authoritarian state in remarks during a forum on crime:

We look upon authority too often and focus over and over again, for 30 or 40 or 50 years, as if there is something wrong with authority. We see only the oppressive side of authority. Maybe it comes out of our history and our background. What we don’t see is that freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do.

In other words, life was better back in authoritarianism’s golden age because citizens bowed to the government and kept to their place. Looking ahead from 1994, he seemed to be saying that the only way to quell the disorder in the streets was to bring all the citizens, especially the criminal element of the lower classes, into submission.

In the authoritarian way of thinking, social ills at the root of unrest are unimportant, and will likely resolve themselves after order is imposed. Of course, suppressing the criminal element does not make crime disappear. It just pushes it into someone else’s district.

After eight years of Cheney and Bush shredding the Bill of Rights and ceding power to themselves, it is unsettling to think that more of the same, or worse, could lie ahead under a Giuliani regime. If he becomes the GOP nominee, all he has to do is run a rematch of 2004, pummel the Democrats, as Bush did, with fear politics and the specter of 9/11 — and cakewalk into the White House. Now that is scary.

I’m still on the fence about which candidate to support next year but have been leaning toward Bill Richardson. He’s got more boots-on-the-ground foreign policy experience than all the other candidates in both parties combined. He’s served in cabinet posts, was a member of the House of Representatives and he’s run two successful campaigns for governor of New Mexico, a state that tends to elect more Republicans than Democrats to high office

But Richardson’s appearance Thursday night at the Human Rights Campaign Presidential Forum has given me pause. It’s not just that he said that homosexuality was a choice — an incredibly stupid statement that he later took back — it was his entire performance. He was obviously uncomfortable, and it was clear that he had not given gay civil rights issues an in-depth analysis. (I know the campaign is being run on a shoe-string but was there no one available who could have given him a briefing?)

My sense is, Richardson is not a dyed-in-the-wool bigot but rather a a clueless macho straight guy who was suddenly immersed in the heady waters of gay politics and quickly found himself to be in over his head.

If Richardson had performed so badly in front of any other group — blacks, union members, women, Irish-Americans — his campaign would be in freefall right now. Fortunately, it was only the gays, so hardly anyone will take notice and he can recover.

He can even rehabilitate his image with gays, if he chooses to. All he has to do is introduce himself to a strata of gay life with which he can probably relate — the gay rodeo. As it happens, a golden opportunity presents itself next weekend when the 16th Annual Zia Regional Rodeo, sponsored by the New Mexico Gay Rodeo Association (NMGRA) will be held in Albuquerque.

Maybe someone in the leadership of NMGRA could invite the governor to attend the rodeo so he could get a taste of gay life closer to his own experience, and begin to rehabilitate his campaign after a disheartening presentation on gay issues.

As soundbites scripted for debates go, I really like this one from today’s event in Chicago:

“For 15 years, I have stood up against the right-wing machine and I’ve come out stronger. So if you want a winner who knows how to take them on, I’m your girl,” [Sen. Hillary] Clinton said.

What’s important this time is winning, and not just in the margins. It’s clear that Bush will not be impeached. The only recourse to accountability left for impeachment advocates is to ensure his party gets a thumpin’ of biblical proportions next year.

I’m still undecided about Clinton (and Obama and Edwards) and leaning toward Bill Richardson. But the threshold issue for me has never been Clinton’s politically calculated vote to authorize Bush’s war in 2002. It’s which candidate is the least likely to run a wimpy-ass campaign like John Kerry’s in 2004. If you can’t defeat Karl Rove, the Swiftboaters and their ilk, you don’t deserve to be the Democratic nominee, much less the president.

The candidate who wins the Democratic primaries next year needs to go on the offensive out the gate. Standing up to the rightwing lies and smears is a good first step. If Clinton walks the talk, who knows, she could be just the woman to do it.

Is it possible that Mitt Romney is even dumber than George Bush? At yesterday’s GOP debate in Iowa, he tossed out the old Saddam equals al Qaeda canard that even Bush has been forced to repudiate:

“Just come home,” dissented Texas Rep. Ron Paul, the lone advocate of a quick troop withdrawal on a presidential campaign debate stage. He said there had never been a good reason to go to war in the first place.

“Has he forgotten about 9/11?” interjected former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.

Last year, during his address to the nation on the fifth anniversary of the 2001 attacks, Bush grudgingly admitted that the connection he and his administration’s top official made between Saddam and the attacks was a lie:

George Bush last night admitted that Saddam Hussein had no hand in the 9/11 terror attacks, but he asked Americans to support a war in Iraq that he said was the defining struggle of our age…

“I am often asked why we are in Iraq when Saddam Hussein was not responsible for the 9/11 attacks,” Mr Bush said

Romney’s assertion otherwise in the debate was of course, a lie. And yet the moderator, George Stephanapolous, the famous liberal, did not stop to ask him if he had new evidence of Saddam’s culpability in the 2001 attacks.

Romney is playing to the ever-shrinking GOP base — particularly to the last vestige of true-believers in the false Saddam-al Qaeda connection rolled out by Bush and his rightwing talk-radio propagandists in 2002 and 2003 during the run-up and aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

What is unsmart about this is the fact that the number of people who remain under the delusion that invading Iraq was retribution for the 2001 attacks is dwindling, even among Republicans. By the time votes are counted 64 weeks from now, the number who cling to the illusion that the attacks justified the war could be minuscule.

Ron Paul, the smartest GOP candidate, and thus the one no chance, also injected this rare moment of common sense into yesterday’s debate:

“If you make a mistake and you’re marching toward a cliff, the best thing you can do is march back,” Texas Congressman Ron Paul said.

The bad news is, history has taught us that intelligence is not even on the list of attributes Republicans look for in their presidents, so if history is to be our guide, they could well foist Romney on the nation, if the November 2008 election is close.

Republicans made good on their promise to “Swiftboat” Hillary Clinton on Monday, deploying their most practiced liar, Vice Pres. Dick Cheney, to go on CNN and insert into the record a falsehood about the contents of a letter Clinton wrote to the Pentagon in May, falsely claiming that Clinton “demanded” to see Pentagon plans for leaving Iraq. The truth is, Clinton simply sought assurance that contingency planning was underway.

Clinton responded by challenging Pres. Bush “set the record straight” on the role of Congress in oversight.

Unfortunately, on the day after Cheney’s intentional lie made a little news, cable news began its full-time coverage of the freeway bridge collapse in Minneapolis — and after today, Congress is heading into a month-long recess. Still, all eyes should be on the Clinton campaign to see if they will respond more forcefully to GOP Swiftboating in the 2008 campaign than the John Kerry campaign did in 2004.

On Monday, in what appears to have been a carefully calculated move, Cheney chose a soft target — “Larry King Live” on CNN — as the platform for his Swiftboat attack on Clinton, knowing full well that King would allow him to get away with deceiving his audience. Cheney arrived for the interview with the lie pre-scripted and ready to go:

KING: A member of the Department of Defense sent Hillary Clinton a letter saying she should not criticize because it helps the enemy. Do you agree with that letter?

CHENEY: It didn’t say she should [not criticize]. She was demanding the plans for withdrawal from Iraq. And…

As noted, Sen. Clinton “was demanding” no such thing. Here’s the text of her letter to the Pentagon in May:

Given the express will of the Congress to implement a phased redeployment of United States forces from Iraq and the importance of proper contingency planning to achieve that goal, I write to request that you provide the appropriate oversight committees in Congress – including the Senate Armed Services Committee – with briefings on what current contingency plans exist for the future withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq. Alternatively, if no such plans exist, please provide an explanation for the decision not to engage in such planning.

The seeds of many problems that continue to plague our troops and mission in Iraq were planted in the failure to adequately plan for the conflict and properly equip our men and women in uniform. Congress must be sure that we are prepared to withdraw our forces without any unnecessary danger.

True to form, Larry King ignored Cheney’s false statement about the Democratic frontrunner, and gave Cheney the opportunity to characterize the Pentagon’s outrageous letter in response to Clinton — which was written by Eric Edleman, a longtime Cheney henchman — as “a good letter” and, what the heck, to compound his lie about the senator:

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