With 90-days to go, Swiftboating Season has begun in earnest as charges and counter-charges by each candidate’s camp of injecting race into the election turned the current US Presidential race into that of a popularity contest for high school class president. No. I must apologise. That characterisation demeans the thousands of young students who prepare platforms, give meaningful speeches and take their civic duty seriously.
The furore exploded across the media this past week over the use of two white women, Paris Hilton and Britney Spears in an attack advert (I’m sorry to use those names in violation of our stated journalistic ethos). The Republicans, desperate to claw back into the race, used racial stereotyping fear, “mysterious” phallic symbols (Obama did speak in front of Berlin’s Victory Tower) and two glam gals’ generally known for their questionable celebrity-seeking antics.
The Democrats charged that this advert was eerily similar to the racially charged spot in 2006 featuring a blonde woman teasingly speaking to camera and asking then Tennessee Congressman, Harold Ford to “give her a call.” That advert tipped the balance against Ford. Democrats cried foul there as well as for attack adverts against Georgia Senator Max Cleland, a man who lost an arm and both legs in combat in Vietnam and the Republicans successfully won his seat claiming he was unpatriotic (?!?).
The Ford advert used the biggest subliminal racial fear tactic known in the US South, that a son of former slaves could rise up and steal/sire the master’s white woman. Bush attack dog strategist Karl Rove 1st injected that thought when he claimed “He’s the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by.” Obama though fell for the bait last week, saying in a stump speech that they were after him because he “didn’t look like all those other guys on the dollar bills…”
Given the opening of the black candidate accepting the race premise, this is where the pundits all jumped in. “Black man,” Barack Obama, spliced together with the glam gals then became the most ridiculously over psycho-analysed piece of footage in history. It also created free Republican publicity. They paid to run the ad five times and then the media ran it for them for free ad nauseum. Mission Accomplished, they wanted to whip up fear of Obama’s blackness to slow his momentum. Couple this with another Internet only Republican attack ad proclaiming Obama as Moses, “The One” and the bar lowered itself to about four feet underground on political attack ads.
So low is the bar that headlines were given last week to Republican Colorado Senate candidate Bob Schaffer’s campaign manager Dick Wadhams for saying over a meaningless vote to adjourn their opponent missed, “”He’s not going to get away with it. We’re going to shove a bunch of 30-second ads up his a– on this issue over the course of the campaign. This guy was fundraising in Colorado and missing votes. That is reprehensible.”
Groan.
We knew it would be a testy campaign. Brand Republican is in tatters. They stand to lose even more House seats this fall than in 2006 with some projections showing a net Democratic gain of 23+ seats. Democrats will also improve their majority in the Senate to 57 Senate seats, a breath away from a magical 60-seat filibuster-proof majority.
No wonder one in the Republican Party wants either Bush or Cheney to come out on the campaign trail or anywhere near the convention in Minneapolis. They never seem to learn. The attack dog strategy didn’t help Hillary Clinton. It lost Republicans the House and Senate in ’06. Now the economy, war(s) that never end, sabre rattling with Iran and general Republican fatigue 14-years after the Gingrich Revolution coupled with record budget deficits on their watch mean change is in the air. Even their “attack Iran now” strategy is in trouble.
NBC News anchorman Brian Williams recently interviewed Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in his Presidential Palace. He was then interviewed by John Stewart on The Daily Show and talked about our overblown fears of Iranian military power. He said of Ahmadinejad, “it was similar to entering one of Saddam’s Palaces two days into the Battle of Baghdad and seeing that the gold bathroom fixtures were actually gold paint and underneath everything was black.” The Republicans need to elevate the threat of Iran to that of Iraq.
Now yesterday’s headlines focused on the release of a damning book by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Ron Suskind showing that the Bush Administration was given concrete evidence that were no WMD’s in Iraq and decided to go ahead with invading the country anyways.
So now we have an even larger scandal brewing yet the silliest fact of all… John McCain is still in a statistical tie or within the margin of error in many daily tracking polls.
Sigh.
90-days. It’s going to get even sillier.
