As long as she ate the mouse she can neither see nor hear, she's like dead, now sing.
Bill Quick comments on this post, and argues that the national sport of Clinton-bashing (erstwhile and continuing) was a valuable public service and was indeed instrumental in putting GWB in the White House. That's really incidental to the point I was making, but I don't disagree that anti-Clintonism was a factor in Gore's electoral debacle. As Bill says, it caused him to shy away from running on Clinton's record, and probably cost him his home state, which was certainly significant.
What I was getting at was that personal attacks on Clinton (the "character issue") never did Congressional Republicans much good, whereas being perceived as mean-spirited, hypocritical, petty, small-minded Gingriches did them a considerable measure of harm; and that this impulse led some of them, I'd say, to adopt ignominious positions like opposing action in Kosovo as an expression of pure partisan animosity, which didn't reflect well on them either. Bill may be right that hostility to Clinton played a larger role in the 2000 election than I was granting, and it certainly shored up distaste for Gore in the red states. But I still think there's a lesson there for the Democrats, as some of them seem poised to make the same kind of mistake. If they draw the opposite lesson, and focus on, or allow themselves to be seen as alluding to or wallowing in, the prevalent "Bush is a moron who stole the election and took us into a war we deserve to lose all because of his Daddy" meme, they'll regret it.
In fact, I think it's possible that Gore's supercilious bearing, and the undercurrent of the then slightly less ubiquitous "Bush is a Moron" theme which it seemed to reflect, was as much a factor in turning off voters who might otherwise have voted for him.
That's all by the way though. The main reason for this post (and the reason the heading is a quote from Rosemary's Baby) is to draw attention to a comment by one of Daily Pundit's frequent commenters, Tony Foresta, which is something of a tour de force: want to read about "fundamentalist Republican propaganda covens" and how to resist the "covert hypnosis" of the "brutish fundamentalist Republican Reich"? Of course you do.
"Our day," he solemnly promises, "is coming." I'm sure he's only trying to help, but I'd venture to say that the Democratic Party would be well-advised to cultivate a certain judicious distance from this "vibrant universe of intelligent and interpenetrating" um, "ideologies." Or so it seems to me.
(P.S. See ya'll at the next Sabbat.)
Posted by Dr. Frank at April 2, 2003 07:58 AM | TrackBack