Shootin' Hoops

Finally, as we reach the dog days of August, the dogs have started barking--I had lost hope for anything really nasty going on in this doldumry presidential race, but then John McCain, down about nine points in latest polls, released his lovely anti-Obama piece, which shows the Democratic candidate refusing to visit wounded soldiers and playing basketball while (presumably?) Rome burns. The ad got a lot more play than its six paid airings (as did Lyndon Johnson's "Daisy" piece in 1964, which only had one paid appearance but was repeated endlessly on the news) but it remains to be seen how effective it will be, since its specifics are so easily rebutted--Obama was indeed shooting hoops, but with soldiers in Kuwait.
Still, its a promising start, and much better for McCain than scarfing down bratwurst while Obama tours Berlin. In the meantime, McCain opponents have been having a field day with homemade videos portraying him as the clumsiest and dumbest Republican presidential candidate since, take your pick, Gerald Ford or Ronald Reagan. This latest is just one. So far, some 98 days from the finish line, Obama is winning handily, but it remains to be seen how he will fare under a relentless assault of nasty campaigning which, despite protests from McCain's people, is coming down the pike.

Pretty Dirty Already

My apologies for not blogging more lately. I have been finishing up another book--one about castaways on deserted islands--which has placed my head in far climes and centuries. What part of me that remained in New Jersey has been dealing with the aftereffects of the severe storms which have devastated much of the county I live in, with trees falling on houses (we lost a phone line to a huge limb), power outages, and my daughter being unexpectedly out of school.
In my mental absence, the general election has been shaping up to be a nicely dirty one. Despite the fact that polls have the two candidates running neck and neck, I agree with the Politico article which quotes historians as saying that Barack Obama should beat McCain overwhelmingly. However, as we know, upsets are part of American political history--see Thomas Dewey, running against the very unpopular president Harry Truman--and anything can happen. Thus far, the dirtiest part of the campaign has focused on Michelle Obama; supposedly a tape will soon surface which will show her using the word "whitey" in an envenomed speech at her and Barack's old Chicago church.
This is most unlikely, but is clever dirty politics--as I always say, dirty tricks only work when one is playing to pre-existing prejudices in the hearts of people, and there is a great deal of pre-existing prejudice against black women who are perceived as powerful. To combat this and other smears (that he is a Muslim, that he refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance, etc) Obama's campaign has started a website which categorically denies them. This isn't likely to have much effect on prejudiced hearts, but it is a sign that those around the Democratic contender know that he must fight back hard and not let the attacks acrue.
Anyway, after only a week of campaigning, a campaign which was supposed to be clean and dignified is pretty dirty already....
A word today about Tim Russert, of NBC's "Meet the Press," who died suddenly on Friday. Russert is someone I always listened to, even when I didn't agree with him, because I felt he had insight into the workings of Washington politics, so his early death comes as a shock. He and I are exact contemporaries and attended the same undergraduate school, John Carroll University in University Heights, Ohio, during the tumultuous late '60s. Our politics there differed--I was far more radical in my response to seminal events like the killing of four students at Kent State University (only a few miles away from John Carroll) in 1969--but he was always an intelligent and essentially moderate and good-humored presence. It'll be hard to be commenting on a presidential campaign without hearing Russert commenting on it as well....

Let The Wild Rumpus Begin!

Senator Barack Obama of Illinois has finally clinched it for the Democrats, after the longest priimary season in history, after twenty debates with his opponent Hillary Clinton, after raising more money than any presidential candidate in history--and it's about time. Primary fatigue has set in in the last month with almost everyone I've spoken to, Democrat or Republican, who feel that it is now time for the two parties to turn their attention to each other.
Obama still has some house-cleaning to do re Hillary Clinton, who is now letting it be known that she will accept a vice-presidential nod. It is not often two such bitter rivals make up in this fashion. JFK and LBJ did it in 1960, although LBJ told a woman friend at the Democratic convention that “One out of every four Presidents has died in office. I’m a gamblin’ man, darlin’, and this is the only chance I got.” (One hopes this is not Hillary's calculation.) To me, anyway, it would seem foolish of Obama to place Hillary in this role, even if there are some fairly decent political reasons for doing so.
Almost lost in all of this so far is the fact that Barack Obama is now the first African-American major party nominee for president in American history. Once he shakes the first woman ever to get close to that job, this fact will become more and more important and will work in his favor, hopefully galvanizing Democrats to come out and vote in record numbers (which they have been doing so far in the primaries). Barack Obama will need these record numbers. Despite the dismal record of the current Administration, he is far from a shoo-in--in fact, part of Hillary's refusal to quit is that she understands that sheis definitely the better candidate against John McCain. Obama will be open to charges of inexperience, of being soft on terror, of being unable to even pick the right church to attend. Race will become an issue, although you won't see John McCain himself bringing it up.
However, Obama has a lot going for him as well. McCain is much older, allied with the Bush fiasco in Iraq--despite his current attempts to scamper away from it--and not well-loved by large portions of his own party. It may indeed be, as Barack Obama has been saying since February of 2007 and said again last night in St. Paul, time for a change. It is certainly at last time for a general election rumpus the likes of which we have never seen before. Let it begin.....

Is Ms. Clinton Crazy?

Michael Goodwin of the New York Daily News, who has been writing a series of rather hysterical anti-Hillary columns, today published responses from readers who agree with his take that Clinton, in her remarks about the 1968 Robert Kennedy assassination, was really talking about a possible Obama hit.
Interesting, several doctors weighed in:

"This was an encoded/unconscious death wish toward Obama. It was not even thinly disguised."
Joseph Reppen, Ph.D., ABPP
"It seems best explained as a Freudian slip."
Tom Schossau, M.D.
"It's hard to know in this campaign whether Hillary's death wish is for Obama, or herself. Whether she has a deep down self-destructive tendency, like the late President [Richard] Nixon, is hard to know, but there are similarities."
William Hogg, M.D.

I had to laugh when I read this. We are apparently now at the stage of a presidential campaign where the good doctors are tossing in "unconscious death wishes" and "Freudian slips." It used to be, before Freud was nearly completely discredited, that somberly tut-tutting shrinks like these were brought in to comment on presidential candidates whose opponents considered them beyond the pale. In the 1964 Goldwater/LBJ slugfest, a nationwide survey of American psychiatrists found that a sizeable percentage of them thought Goldwater was unfit to serve as President because he suffered from clinical paranoia. Going ever further back, in 1896, the august New York Times hired a bunch of alienists (i.e, shrinks) to comment on William Jennings Bryan's psyche. In September of that year, just as the election heated up to fever pitch, the McKinley-supporting Times published an interesting little article entitled “Is Mr. Bryan Crazy?” which looked at any number of the Democratic candidate’s utterances and claimed that they were not the workings of a rational mind. The Times editors also included a letter from a distinguished alienist stating that if Bryan won the election “there would be a madman in the White House.”
Not content with this, the Times interviewed several more alienists and published the results two days later. These eminent medical geniuses said Bryan suffered from megalomania, paranoia querulent (complaining too much), and querulent logorrhea (talking about complaining too much). One other “expert” simply said, “I don’t think Bryan is ordinarily crazy…But I should like to examine him as a degenerate.”
Perhaps Goodwin and the Daily News will enlighten us further about the dark recesses of Hillary's psyche by calling for a round table shrink discussion like this....

Enough is Enough

Some people have asked me why I seem to take such great delight in the good old days of American presidential dirty tricks--bagmen delivering satchels full of dough in the 1880s, Al Smith being roundly dismissed as a druken papist, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon bugging their opponents campaigns.
I guess it's because these seem like real, old-fashioned, in-your-face-red-blooded-American dirty tricks, as opposed to the game of "gotcha" we've been playing lately. The whole brouhaha about Hillary's comments in South Dakota is the straw that finally broke this camel's back. To claim that she actually meant to refer to the assassination of Robert Kennedy as a way of saying that Barack Obama might be assassinated is simply idiotic and the people who believe it are either idiots or they have a political agenda. The report first came through the New York Post, which wrote that Hillary said ‘Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June,’ making an odd comparison between the dead candidate and Barack Obama.”
This is not the comparison she was making. She was simply referencing--as she has done before, and as others (including myself) have done before--that certain primaries have run well into the summer, including that of 1968. She was not talking about the possibility that Barack Obama might be assassinated. My irritation with people who believe this goes back to the Barack Obama supporters who have "pre-martyred" him, walking around speaking in hushed tones abut the possibility that he might be killed. This tactic makes it seems as if Obama is some holy figure, rather that the very flawed and inexperienced, although inspirational, candidate he is.
This entire Democratic primary began with Hillary and her husband being considered the smartest politicians in the universe. Now we are led to believe they are the dumbest. Somewhere in between lies the truth. In the meantime, I'll take a good bagman anytime....

At Long Last....

Well, the first real salvo of the 2008 general election has been fired and I, for one, am frankly glad to see it. Like a lot of people I have gotten extremely bored with the infighting among the Democrats and even though Hillary is all but gone, I had assumed it would be some time before we got to the donkeys and the elephants going at it trunk and tail.
But our president can always be counted on, can't he? His calling Barack Obama the Neville Chamberlain of the Mideast is the beginning of a long, hot, and hopefully fun summer. In doing so, he was merely following my "Ten Top Smears" through history playbook, specifically Number 10: "You're Not Tough Enough!" which is classically used by Republicans against Democrats, sometimes to devastating effect. John McCain immediately chimed in agreeing with W., and so it seems we have a tactic going here.
Probably not a very good one, though, since Bush's policies in the Mideast have been so roundly discredited, but, still, its nice to see us heading back in the direction of good old-fashioned smears. What with the California Supreme Court overturning the ban on gay marriage, I have to say, I am rubbing my hands and chuckling....

Now THAT was a primary

Although Hillary is soldiering on, it seems the end of this extended Democratic primary season is nearly upon us. Many have decried the nasty politics waged, especially by the Hillary camp, but, by comparison with past primary seasons, it was almost nothing. Some underhanded electioneering by Hillary supporters in North Carolina, where they pretended to register black voters, a few attack ads by both sides, nasty comments during debates--really, how bad was that?
It was certainly nothing compared to one of the nastiest primary campaign battles of all, which took place in 1972, an election most people remember for the Watergate bugging in June, but the winter and spring of that year were filled with trickery and vicious attacks launched by Republican dirty tricksters attempting to influence the outcome of the Democrat primary. If you think what has happened in the last three months was really dirty, keep reading...

Early in 1972, President Nixon, whose approval ratings hovered at only about 48 percent, felt that he was vulnerable to a challenge from a strong Democratic candidate.
So it became the goal of his dirty tricks managers like Special Assistant to the President Dwight Chapin to “foster a split between Democratic hopefuls” in the primaries. Teddy Kennedy was not a problem—the last surviving Kennedy brother had pretty much blown his presidential chances by driving a car off a bridge in 1969 and drowning the young girl with him.
Going into the New Hampshire primary in February, Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine, Hubert Humphrey’s 1968 running mate, was predicted to be the big winner—in fact, most journalists had already anointed him the Democratic presidential nominee. And Richard Nixon viewed Muskie as a formidable candidate. But then strange things began happening. Suddenly, New Hampshire voters began receiving phone calls from rude black people—phone calls that came in late at night or very early in the morning—saying that they had been bused in from Harlem to work for Muskie. And then conservative editor of the Manchester Union Leader, William Loeb, published a letter purportedly written by an ordinary citizen which accused Muskie of using the word “Canuck” to refer to French-Canadians. In defending himself against this and other slurs on his wife, Muskie, standing outdoors before microphones and cameras, began to cry. Or, since it was snowing, perhaps a snowflake had landed in his eye—it’s impossible to tell from tapes of the incident.
But Muskie did lose his cool, and the rap on him now was that he was unable to handle pressure. He won New Hampshire, but by a much smaller margin than predicted. Only later was it discovered that the “Canuck” letter was written by White House aide Kenneth Clawson.
Things just got worse when Muskie headed for the Florida primary. There, many voters received a letter written on Muskie campaign stationary, which said (falsely) that Hubert Humphrey had been arrested for drunk driving in 1967. Other letters under the Muskie letterhead claimed that prominent Democratic senator and presidential hopeful Henry “Scoop” Jackson had fathered a child with a 17-year-old girl.
No detail was too small. Posters appeared on Florida highways which read “Help Muskie in Busing More Children Now.” Ads were placed in tiny free shopper’s newsletters saying: “Muskie: Would you accept a black running mate?” And, at a Muskie press conference in Miami, someone let go a handful of white mice with tags attached to them which read: “Muskie is a rat fink.”
The person behind all this Florida mayhem was Donald Segretti, prince of dirty tricks. Segretti, whose name means “secret” in Italian, was a California lawyer who had been law school pals with several students who later became Nixon staffers—in particular, Dwight Chapin, the man who hired him and paid him $16,000, plus expenses, to wreak havoc in the primaries.
Muskie came in fourth in Florida and was finished as a candidate. Segretti’s role was discovered in the investigations after the Watergate break-in and he served four and a half months in prison for misdemeanors associated with illegal campaign activities.
After Florida, Hubert Humphrey and George McGovern were the main Democratic candidates, and Nixon’s men rose to combat this. Setting up a phony “Democrats for Nixon” group (shades of Tricky Dick’s California gubernatorial run) they produced leaflets describing Humphrey as a man who, as Johnson’s Vice-President, had helped escalate the war in Vietnam. Some of the leaflets had a picture of a fish over Humphrey’s face, with the caption: “There’s Something Fishy About Hubert Humphrey.”
Partly as a result of the ill feelings caused by these fake ads, Humphrey and McGovern were unable to present a united front when McGovern became the nominee and the time came to go after Richard Nixon.