Tuesday, September 07, 2004
More Of This Please
Josh Marshall has some quotes from a letter sent by President Jimmy Carter over the weekend to Zell Miller, though from whence came the letter to Josh is not explained. Tis a beautiful thing to read.
Consider those snippets catnip and jump straight over to read the rest if you haven't yet. Josh mentions that Carter's press secretary said the letter is private and there will be no further comment, which is a bit disappointing, though I can certainly understand why the ex-President doesn't wish to get in the mud with Zell.
Not so the right wing; they're embracing him. They don't believe he was too extreme in tone or message for mainstream consumption. You can find examples of what I mean at The Corner here, here, and here.
Apparently, President Bush , too, now thinks it's safe to invoke the "Zell" factor on the campaign trail. And it will be if the Democratic Party doesn't find an intelligent way to push back. The most insidious aspect of Miller's appearance was the sense he gave that he was sharing inside secrets about what Democrats are really like. How about some big-name Democrats, Joe Biden, Richard Durbin, Bob Graham, Sen Clinton, maybe some former Cabinet Secretaries, and maybe some of those no longer in the Senate, like Sam Nunn, stepping up to be counted, to say that none of them could begin to recognize the John Kerry they've known over the years with the smeared picture Zell Miller attempted to paint of a Senator.
A lot of folks who didn't see Zell's performance are hearing about it from partisans. They need to hear about a different interpretation of why that extraordinarily ugly performance was indicative of the true meaning of the entire Republican convention.
They need to hear that Republicans are still the party that only knows how to divide Americans, that Bush & co are trying to scare the rest of us into believing that the utter mess their party has created, here and abroad, in the past four years is the best Americans can expect; Americans need to hear about how and why Republicans use those classic techniques of propoganda, derision, smears, and lies, because they're afraid of John Kerry, and because they can't run on their actual record. Americans need to have it pointed out that George Bush and his entire campaign seem incapable of an intelligent dialogue not based on the trivialization of every issue, from whether or not we should be sensitive toward terrorists, which no one in the Kerry campaign ever suggested we should, to the President's failure to talk about what those plans are of his to fight the war on terror, other than to repeat the tired nonsense we've heard over and over again before and after the invasion of Iraq, for instance, as he said today, that between accepting the word of a madman and protecting this country, he'll choose the latter every time, as if any Democrat would choose the former, and as if those were even remotely the two choices presented to him at the time.
Democrats have got to look for more creative ways than commercials and campaign stops to make their case, ways that will shake the SCLM up a bit, get them off of their own message and force them to deal with the Kerry/Edwards message.
Great Georgia Democrats who served in the past, including Walter George, Richard Russell, Herman Talmadge, and Sam Nunn disagreed strongly with the policies of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and me, but they remained loyal to the party in which they gained their public office. Other Democrats, because of philosophical differences or the race issue, like Bo Callaway and Strom Thurmond, at least had the decency to become Republicans.
Everyone knows that you were chosen to speak at the Republican Convention because of your being a “Democrat,” and it’s quite possible that your rabid and mean-spirited speech damaged our party and paid the Republicans some transient dividends.
Perhaps more troublesome of all is seeing you adopt an established and very effective Republican campaign technique of destroying the character of opponents by wild and false allegations.
Consider those snippets catnip and jump straight over to read the rest if you haven't yet. Josh mentions that Carter's press secretary said the letter is private and there will be no further comment, which is a bit disappointing, though I can certainly understand why the ex-President doesn't wish to get in the mud with Zell.
Not so the right wing; they're embracing him. They don't believe he was too extreme in tone or message for mainstream consumption. You can find examples of what I mean at The Corner here, here, and here.
Apparently, President Bush , too, now thinks it's safe to invoke the "Zell" factor on the campaign trail. And it will be if the Democratic Party doesn't find an intelligent way to push back. The most insidious aspect of Miller's appearance was the sense he gave that he was sharing inside secrets about what Democrats are really like. How about some big-name Democrats, Joe Biden, Richard Durbin, Bob Graham, Sen Clinton, maybe some former Cabinet Secretaries, and maybe some of those no longer in the Senate, like Sam Nunn, stepping up to be counted, to say that none of them could begin to recognize the John Kerry they've known over the years with the smeared picture Zell Miller attempted to paint of a Senator.
A lot of folks who didn't see Zell's performance are hearing about it from partisans. They need to hear about a different interpretation of why that extraordinarily ugly performance was indicative of the true meaning of the entire Republican convention.
They need to hear that Republicans are still the party that only knows how to divide Americans, that Bush & co are trying to scare the rest of us into believing that the utter mess their party has created, here and abroad, in the past four years is the best Americans can expect; Americans need to hear about how and why Republicans use those classic techniques of propoganda, derision, smears, and lies, because they're afraid of John Kerry, and because they can't run on their actual record. Americans need to have it pointed out that George Bush and his entire campaign seem incapable of an intelligent dialogue not based on the trivialization of every issue, from whether or not we should be sensitive toward terrorists, which no one in the Kerry campaign ever suggested we should, to the President's failure to talk about what those plans are of his to fight the war on terror, other than to repeat the tired nonsense we've heard over and over again before and after the invasion of Iraq, for instance, as he said today, that between accepting the word of a madman and protecting this country, he'll choose the latter every time, as if any Democrat would choose the former, and as if those were even remotely the two choices presented to him at the time.
Democrats have got to look for more creative ways than commercials and campaign stops to make their case, ways that will shake the SCLM up a bit, get them off of their own message and force them to deal with the Kerry/Edwards message.
