Asks Jonah Goldberg, recounting the history of Republican attacks on Democratic presidential candidates:
According to the liberal history books, in 1988 the GOP cast Michael Dukakis as too elitist, cosmopolitan and not American enough. In 1992, it ran a similar attack against Bill Clinton -- remember the hullabaloo about draft dodging and that trip to Russia? In 2000, ditto with Al Gore, though the emphasis was less on foreignness and more on extraterrestrialness. And in 2004, there was John Kerry's "global test" for U.S. national security.
Fighting charges of racism with the we're-boringly-predicatable defense.
Even the defense is old, old, old. Think of all those people who rely on the ancient quip "I don't hate [black people/women/whatever], I hate everybody."
The new McCain ad hits Obama hard on the Ayers connection.
That's unpleasant for Obama supporters, but is it unfair? Is it racist? From the SF Chronicle:
While Obama's campaign has fended off racially rooted attacks since its inception, analysts say the ones surfacing in the past few days have been more overt, arriving as many undecided voters are making their final decision. They are part of a recent stream of attacks on his background, including his religion and his connections to a former '60s radical.
"It is the Willie Hortonization of Obama," said University of San Francisco associate professor of political science James Taylor....
Instead of using a grainy photo of a grizzled convict [like the Willie Horton ad used against Dukakis], the current attacks, analysts say, are embedded in "coded" language. They cite as examples Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin portraying Obama as a cultural outsider and friend to terrorists and the dismissive way his Republican opponent, Sen. John McCain, referred to Obama at their Tuesday night debate as "that one."...
Regardless, some attending McCain-Palin rallies are responding to this kind of incitement. The Secret Service is investigating press reports that someone might have said "kill him" after Palin tried to connect Obama to former Weather Underground leader Bill Ayers. Some attending McCain's rally Wednesday in Pennsylvania interrupted him with shouts of "socialist," "terrorist" and "liar."
Earlier this week, Palin told a group of donors in Colorado that "this is not a man who sees America like you and I see America." Obama, Palin said, "is someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect, imperfect enough, that he's palling around with terrorists who would target their own country," a reference to Obama's connection with Ayers... Conservative talk radio show host Rush Limbaugh echoed this attack by referring to Obama's "mentorship" by Ayers....
Why is it racial to stir up doubt about whether Obama is a mainstream Democrat? Most of the argument seems to be that because he is black, any doubts about him have a synergistic effect with any racism that happens to be out there.
By the way, there is a new Gallup poll in which the vast majority of voters say race has no effect on their decisions. Yes, of course, people often won't admit it or don't realize it. But the few who do say it will affect them report positive and negative effects that are close to balanced, and yet the positive effect in favor of Obama seems to have the edge. That said, the unadmitted effects are probably much more likely to be negatives against Obama.
Now let me be clear here, if Obama goes in this race with a 5- point lead and losing this election, the consequences are -- bull, man. I mean I don't think that's going to happen, but I think David it's a point to bring up.
But you stop and contemplate this country if Obama goes in and he has a consistent five point lead and loses the election, it would be very, very, very dramatic out there.
Some -- e.g., Rush Limbaugh -- think Carville was envisioning riots. Limbaugh observes:
Now, I want you to imagine if, say, I said something like this or some other conservative anywhere, said, "Yeah, if Obama, if he loses, you know, there's going to be riots out there. The blacks are going to riot." This is what James Carville said. You tell me where the racism is in this country. It is on the left. Here's Carville trying to scare America. He's doing two things. He didn't accidentally come up with that 5% figure. These guys are worried to death about the Wilder Effect. They are worried about the Bradley Effect, meaning they are worried that people are lying to the pollsters, saying they will vote for Obama.
But because they are really racists and don't want to admit that to a pollster, that they get to the voting booth in private, will vote for the white guy, Yosemite Sam instead of The Messiah. So that selection of five points, that's key. I've told you if Obama is not up by ten or so, it's going to be a much closer race than everybody thinks. But for James Carville to suggest that the political immaturity of the majority of the black population of this country is such that they will take to the streets and riot, I hope all of you African-Americans listening to this program understand how that means the Democrat Party sees you.
In fact, I might go so far as to say -- not about Carville, I don't know -- but there might be some of the Democrats that wouldn't mind seeing some riots if Obama loses. Nevertheless that's what they think of you. You are going to take to the streets, going to be Rodney King and South Central Los Angeles all over the country. So there's a fright factor here. There is a bigotry factor here, and of course there is racism on parade all over the place. And once again the racism originates and comes from the Democrat Party.
But the debate’s most telling passage arrived when Biden welled up in recounting his days as a single father after his first wife and one of his children were killed in a car crash. Palin’s perky response — she immediately started selling McCain as a “consummate maverick” again — was as emotionally disconnected as Michael Dukakis’s notoriously cerebral answer to the hypothetical 1988 debate question about his wife being “raped and murdered.” If, as some feel, Obama is cool, Palin is ice cold. She didn’t even acknowledge Biden’s devastating personal history.
The bitch! Hey, wait, does that mean she's cerebral now?
... She has more testosterone than anyone else at the top of her party.
And a guy.
Palin is an antidote to the whiny Republican image that [Barney] Frank nailed.
Frank's column is full of sexual imagery, but I think that one was unintentional. (And, by the way, the Blitt illustration is arguably sexual.)
You have to wonder how long it will be before [Republicans] plead with [McCain] to think of his health, get out of the way and pull the ultimate stunt of flipping the ticket. Palin, we can be certain, wouldn’t even blink.
For LBJ, Ford, Ike, JFK, and Dukakis. I love the variation in style, which, in each case, belongs so clearly to its decade.
I don't agree with John Dickerson that these are all great ads. I didn't remember that Dukakis put out that "heartbeat away" ad. Man, that was in poor taste. The Ford one was poignantly pathetic. The JFK ad was incredibly boring. The Ike ad was similarly boring but fascinating to us today because of the very old-fashioned presentation of the woman's role. That leaves Johnson's anti-Goldwater ad. I loved that one.
We were watching a brief clip yesterday, but here's the longer version, courtesy of Hot Air. Watch the whole thing. A man named Frank asks a question about law school credentials that sets Biden off. Biden spews a list of claimed achievements — some of which turn out to be false — and — this is I want to focus on — concludes with a windy oration about how what this country needs is a Democrat with great powers of oration.
I'm picturing the young Barack Obama, watching this on C-SPAN and a light bulb goes on over his head:
Here's the text of that last part:
It seems to me if you can speak, you're at a liability in the Democratic Party anymore. It seems to me you've all become heartless technocrats. It seems to me that you forget that what happens is we've never as a party, we have never as a party moved this nation by 14-point position papers and 9-point programs.
It seems that when we got involved in the civil rights movement, Frank, nobody asked Martin Luther King what his legislative agenda was. He marched to change attitudes. When the women's movement started, it had not moved with a constitutional amendment. They marched to change attitudes.
And this party better understand full well that it's about time that we change our attitude and we begin to change the attitudes of Americans about what their responsibilities are to the poor, about what their responsibilities are to other people, and about what our responsibility in the world is, and that requires changing attitudes.
But Frank, I promise you'll see my 15-point plans and 19-point position papers and you'll be able to make a judgment when Gary Hart and I stand there — who knows more about foreign policy, Gary or me? — and when you see that Dick Gephardt and I stand there, you'll be able to make a judges about whether Dick Gephardt or I know more about economic policy.
But ultimately, Frank, this country needs a leader, and leaders change attitudes about people, and it's the ironic twist that in the wake of Ronald Reagan that the only one thing he knew how to do was the one thing that is now being... the currency of which is in fact now being devalued so much.
Maybe this was the moment when Barack Obama first envisioned his path to the presidency, first saw how he might be the one who could, like Ronald Reagan and Martin Luther King, use the power of speech to change attitudes.
That C-SPAN clip was recorded on April 3, 1987, and in September of 1987, there was some conspicuous apologizing for the factual misstatements he made. The chronology works: Obama entered law school one year later, in the fall of 1988.
Here was Biden, prescribing what the party needed but crumpling when challenged about his law school — the solid but not prestigious Syracuse University College of Law. Obama then went to Harvard, a law school no one can dare disrespect, where he would pick up the credentials that would hush the Franks of this world.
In the fall of 1988, Obama saw the Democratic Party lose with a man who looked for all the world like the heartless technocrat Biden had warned us about:
Did Biden inspire Obama back in in 1987-88? Maybe Biden knew he did, and he was thinking about that — thinking about himself — when he enthused awkwardly about "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy."
Now, Obama enfolds him, and everything comes full circle. The planets align. What was once so wrong is now all right.
ADDED: A commenter doubts that Obama would have seen this video back in 1987. Did people sit around watching C-SPAN back then? I remember the phenomenon of the "C-SPAN junkie" from the 80s. Don't you think Obama is the kind of person who'd have watched "The Road to the White House," that endless feed of presidential campaign events, which was already on in those days? Here's a NYT article by Andrew Rosenthal from October 1987:
C-SPAN's Spotlight Brings Quiet Corners of Campaigning Into View
Bruce Babbitt subscribed to it to help him learn how to look better on television. Tom Rath, adviser to Senator Bob Dole in New Hampshire, uses it to observe campaign rivals with a degree of intimacy unheard of in previous elections. And it played an important role in the disintegration of Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr.'s campaign.
The Washington-based Cable Satellite Public Affairs Network, once known primarily as ''the network that dares to be boring,'' has found new prominence and respect in the 1988 Presidential election season.
C-SPAN still is not considered so influential on the course of the campaign as newspapers and the major networks. But some political operatives believe its blanket coverage has started to change the rules of campaigning, bringing television into areas once shielded from general view and exposing candidates to minute analysis by their opponents and the press....
The power of C-SPAN was dramatically illustrated last month toward the end of Mr. Biden's campaign. Nan Gibson, C-SPAN's press coordinator, says that after publication of newspaper articles about a speech in which the Senator had lifted the family history of a British politician, she received scores of calls from reporters interested in the network's tape of Mr. Biden's remarks.
The major networks' news programs televised the C-SPAN tape in their coverage of the story, and another C-SPAN tape contributed to a subsequent Newsweek article that told of how Mr. Biden, at a New Hampshire campaign event, had misstated his academic record.
''Reporters are using us as a video archive,'' Ms. Gibson said. ''They can't be everywhere at once, so they can watch from here.''...
The network ... has greatly expanded its campaign reporting, mostly through a weekly program, ''Road to the White House,'' on which C-SPAN's political editor, Carl M. Rutan, is host....
''C-SPAN brings everything that the candidates are doing into the people's living rooms,'' said Phil Roeder, executive director of the Iowa Democratic Party. ''It's the high-tech version of retail politics,'' the style of one-on-one personalized campaigning deemed mandatory for success in Iowa and New Hampshire.....
At small campaign events, C-SPAN crews attach a wireless microphone to the candidate's clothing and use a shotgun microphone to reach everyone else. The object, Mr. Rutan said, is to record every word the candidate says and every gesture he makes as he shakes hands, kisses babies and drinks coffee....
But the presence of C-SPAN cameras, political operatives said, also forces candidates to be more careful about such things as efforts to tailor their remarks for different parts of the country. Mr. Rutan, C-SPAN's political editor, said that after Mr. Biden's experience, campaign aides were more wary.
''In the past, candidates have been able to go where they want and maybe stretch the truth just a little bit,'' he said. ''Suddenly what they say in a small Iowa town is on the record, just as if they had said it at the National Press Club in Washington.''
In 1987, C-SPAN was teaching some crucial lessons about the future of political campaigning, lessons taught at Joe Biden's expense, and I'll bet Obama was watching, learning, and — for Joe Biden — empathizing.
Think about it: John Kerry, Michael Dukakis.... Is there a Massachusetts demeanor that just doesn't feel natural and normal to Americans in other regions? Something that seems cold or haughty or insubstantial? I mean no disrespect to Massachusettans — what the hell is the word for people from Massachusetts? — I'm quite serious. Massachusetts seems to produce a lot of candidates or near-candidates, and then when Americans take a closer look at them, they experience a strange revulsion.
IN THE COMMENTS: Theo Boehm writes:
I'm originally from California, but I've lived most of my adult life in Massachusetts. I can tell you categorically that the problem with Mitt Romney is NOT that he is "from" Massachusetts. I've been here about as long as he has, and, believe me, you're never "from" Massachusetts until your people have been here...oh...five or six generations. The kittens may have been born in the oven; that doesn't make them muffins.
Mitt Romney doesn't sound like he's from anywhere in Massachusetts; he doesn't have the body language or manner of someone from Eastern Massachusetts; and his religion and Western origins are seriously weird around here.
No, if you find Mitt Romney offputting, it's not because of Massachusetts. It's because he's an uninspiring, stiff bore. They grow those anywhere.
Michael Dukakis was an echt Massachusetts type: a well-tamed little nerdy Brookline doctor's son. Dukakis is, to Massachusetts connoisseurs, from Central Casting. Romney is from Not Around Here. The differences may be subtle to outsiders, but to Massachustts people, they're glaring.
John Kerry is a special case. He's not so much distinctly from Massachusetts, as he is a generic New England preppie. Those types range all over the Northeast landscape, but tend to have been fledged in places like Andover, Exeter, Yale, Dartmouth, and Harvard. They may wind up in New York or Massachusetts, but they usually have little local affinity. Bill Weld was another one of this type—a vastly more amusing and decent human being than Kerry, but very much of Kerry's class.
Of course the Kennedys are from Massachusetts, but they are a weird and nearly extinct breed: Irish who aped the accents and manners of the old Yankee codfish aristocracy. There are no old Yankee aristocrats to ape any more, and the Kennedy accent is dead as a doornail. You'll notice the younger Kennedy generation doesn't sound at all like Uncle Ted or the late, sainted JFK.
Massachusetts is halfway to England: You can tell where someone is from within a small area, what their socioeconomic status is, and what their ethnicity is as soon as they open their mouths. It's fading a bit, but it's still here. And, believe me, if you're from anywhere else in the country, you'll never figure it out.
I remember being at a dinner party soon after I got here, where someone pointed to another guest and said, "Lynn!" The other guest reacted in mock horror and said, "Oh no! WEST Lynn!" All the other guests were laughing their heads off. If you don't know what that was about, well, you're not from around here, are you?
No, neither Mitt nor I are From Here, and we never will be. You can blame Massachusetts for a lot, but please, don't blame it for Mitt Romney.
In '88, Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis was leading the Democratic White House hopefuls. On April 12, he debated his remaining Democratic rivals in Manhattan. One of them, Sen. Al Gore, mentioned the Massachusetts prison furlough plan that Dukakis had defended. Under that particular program, criminals - even murderers sentenced to life in prison without parole - had been granted, Gore noted critically, "weekend passes." But Dukakis dismissed Gore: "Al, the difference between you and me is that I have run a criminal justice system. You haven't."...
[Dukakis] had been fatally wounded, politically, by Gore... he just didn't know it....
Pinkerton himself, as director of research for the George H.W. Bush campaign, worked on keeping the weekend passes issue alive, and it destroyed Dukakis.
...Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton reminds me a lot of Dukakis. As he was two decades ago, she's from a big state, has a lot of money, is ahead in the polls - and she's been grievously injured. This time, the issue isn't prison furloughs, but driver's licenses for illegal immigrants in her "home" state of New York. Clinton has broadly defended Gov. Eliot Spitzer's unpopular plan, even as most New Yorkers have reviled it....
This issue, like the weekend passes issue, resonates deeply with the voting public, "but not inside the 'nominating wing' of the Democratic Party":
So once again, Republicans are sniffing political blood.
