Gore's 2000 campaign manager: How to Beat Bush

Gore's 2000 campaign manager: How to Beat Bush:

It’s hard to travel across the country these days without seeing an old familiar bumper sticker: “Somewhere in Texas, a village is missing its idiot.” Perhaps the slogan rang true for many progressive voters in this highly partisan, highly charged and highly polarized electorate. But, if the bumper-sticker crowd believes it refers to George W. Bush, they are sorely mistaken.

Sen. John Kerry can win this election by understanding that he is running against a shrewd, clever and an extremely intelligent opponent who was trained in political combat by the late GOP strategist Lee Atwater.

See, even the other side admits it regularly. That's why I find it funny when partisans on the left stick to the "Bush is dumb" story. But it's fine with me if they continue to underestimate him.

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19:35 (utc-4)
edited: 21:20 (utc-4)

 

Mark Steyn: Something tells me Bush holds all the aces

Mark Steyn: Something tells me Bush holds all the aces (via LGF)

At the beginning of the year, Thomas Lifson, who was at Harvard Business School with George W Bush, made an interesting observation about the President. He notes that young George "was a very avid and skillful poker player" when he was a Business Administration student and that "one of the secrets of a successful poker player is to encourage your opponent to bet a lot of chips on a losing hand. This is a pattern of behavior one sees repeatedly in George W Bush's political career".

Indeed one does. In the months following Mr Lifson's observation, the President sat back, as John Kerry's consultants, the Iowa caucus voters, the Democratic Party at large, and the media convinced themselves that the one card that trumps Bush's leadership in the war on terror was Kerry's four months in Vietnam, and bet everything on it. They have just lost that hand.

Kerry is in seclusion, unable to expose himself to any but the most sycophantic interviewers, and getting whumped by hundreds upon hundreds of fellow Swift boat veterans, plus former POWs, plus retired admirals, over every aspect of his brief stay in the Mekong Delta.

The Senator put his money on the wrong war. After a couple of entertaining weeks of the aggrieved Swiftees driving down his poll numbers in battleground states, it seems a shame to interrupt the implosion of the Kerry campaign for the Republican convention. But I'm sure the seared Senator is grateful for the intermission, and for the rest of us the next week affords a rare opportunity in this election campaign to catch up with the issues of the current millennium before the inept Kerry resumes bogging us down in his personal Vietnam quagmire again.

Also:

... Kerry ... had no jokes at all [in his convention speech] except a leaden clunker about the destiny-freighted detail of having been born in a hospital's "west wing" - wouldja believe it? and how many wings does a hospital have anyway? and doesn't this communicate Kerry's sense of entitlement rather than his sense of humour - formal confirmation that he believes he was literally born to be president?

This fits right in with this piece by James Lileks from the other day.

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18:46 (utc-4)
edited: 19:03 (utc-4)

 

Sunbathing

Just came in from swimming and then sunbathing+snoozing for hours. Awesome.

I realized that the person who built our house specifically angled it so the back yard would get the afternoon sun in the summer. Too bad the trees have grown a lot over 50 years, since now there's a smaller angle from which we can get direct sunlight (which means fewer hours of the day).

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17:52 (utc-4)
edited: 18:30 (utc-4)

 

Michael Graham: John Kerry: Not So Swift

Oh my gosh, Lorie links to a pretty funny, but devastating article about Kerry, John Kerry: Not So Swift, that focuses largely on his anti-war activism, and starts out thusly:

Listening to John Kerry complain about the scrutiny his Vietnam record is getting is like Pamela Anderson complaining about the fact that guys keep staring at her breasts. What the hell did you expect?

When you turn the Democratic National Convention into a four-day screening of Apocalypse Now — complete with the candidate's own home movies; when you stride to the podium with a crisp salute and a "reporting for duty"; when your political entourage has more military uniforms in it than the coatroom of a Subic Bay bordello; in short, when you base much of your campaign for president on two tours of duty in 'Nam — you, sir, have no right to complain that your opponents are too obsessed with the past.

If there were ever a candidate who is getting exactly the campaign treatment he deserves, that man is John F. Kerry.

What I, a former GOP political flak and campaign lackey, can't figure out is what genius in the Democratic Party looked at John Kerry and said, "Yeah, Vietnam — that's the ticket!" Why not get Scott Peterson to run for attorney general as the pro-life candidate?

There are people in American public life for whom Vietnam would be a worse campaign issue than it is for John Kerry. Jane Fonda, former members of the Kent State National Guard, Lt. William Calley of My Lai …

That's about it.

But for John Kerry, whose weakness as a candidate is the perception (fair or otherwise) that he is a typical Massachusetts liberal, it's hard to think of an issue better suited to cement that perception than a campaign reminding people that he launched his political career as a long-haired, ribbon-throwing, fist-shaking, Fonda-friendly peacenik.

Definitely read the whole thing.

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12:04 (utc-4)

 

Referrer spam about eskimos?

Anyone else get referrer spam about eskimos?? It's bizarre.

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11:09 (utc-4)