October 23, 2004 by lonbud

The Fear & Ad Hominem Approach

With ten days to go before a presidential election billed on both sides as the most important in a generation, our incumbent’s desperation is on full display. Sadly for John Kerry, who, barring outright election fraud, should receive enough popular and electoral college votes on November 2nd to become the next President of the United States, any victory will be a pyrrhic one.

It isn’t hard to imagine, is it, an incumbent who so believed in his approach to government and in his record of accomplishment that he would barnstorm the nation in the home stretch (or even do it calmly, stately, from his office in Washington), calling out to his fellow citizens, “look at all we’ve done, see how better-off you and your neighbor are, imagine what more we can do!”

Instead, we have an incumbent who’ll speak only to handpicked groups of confirmed supporters, his candidacy targeting ‘swing states’ and ‘undecided voters’ with a campaign of fear and personal defamation against his opponent.

Yesterday the Bush/Cheney campaign unveiled its advertising hole card, a piece they claim to have ‘focus grouped’ months ago and have been reserving for the ‘powerful message’ focus groups took away from it. In the ad we see a pack of wolves skulking around a spooky forest while a foreboding narrator warns that our enemies are ‘out there,’ lying in wait, can ‘smell weakness.’  There’s an uplifting message, America!

Perhaps I am blinded by naiveté, but I think enough people can recognize when their baser instincts are being pandered to, and I say this kind of desperate appeal will backfire on George W. Bush.

Another hallmark of their desperation is the Bush/Cheney campaign’s drive to vilify and defame Mr. Kerry’s wife, railing that she is a foreign-born, ultra-liberal, billionaire party-girl (with a mind of her own!) who is somehow unfit to play the chaste, demure role of America’s First Lady. This is the same tack Republicans took against Hillary Clinton, and while it may not result in some state sending a Senator Heinz-Kerry to Congress eight years from now, it will hardly keep Mr. Bush from heading back to his Ranch for the final time in January.

Already wracked with fear the election is lost, Republicans have registered thousands of ‘poll watchers’ in states they deem ‘critical,’ to challenge the ‘qualifications’ of Democratic voters; they have already showered local election offices with thousands of names of Democratic voters whose registrations are ‘incomplete’ or ‘invalid’ or ‘improper;’ they have already massed armies of lawyers to contest the outcome of the election in the courts when their man is found lacking the votes to remain in office.

To be sure, Democrats have registered poll watchers as well, who they are training not to challenge any voter’s ‘qualifications,’ rather, to support those whose right to vote may be questioned. And they have their lawyers on call, ready to resolve a disputed election by judicial fiat if necessary.

It brings to mind Steven Stills singing about battle lines being drawn and something happening here, except this time it is exactly clear.

Mr. Kerry is facing four years of trying to clean up the mess Mr. Bush has made of the nation’s standing in the Middle East and in the whole of the international community, with stanching the flow of national resources into private hands and foreign lands, with securing the country and its citizens from the murderous hatred the Bush administration has unleashed in the world. All the while, his personal peccadilloes will be trumpeted through bullhorns, his wife will be cast as Lady MacBeth, his daughters as street-corner harlots.

The stock market will languish as corporate America is forced to pry itself from the Federal teat, and the value of the dollar will continue to erode in the face of its unrelenting replication by the Federal Reserve during the past four years. And Mr. Kerry will be faced, four years hence, by an opponent who will challenge him on the hardships the country has had to face, who will proclaim the country cannot afford four more years of the same old same old.

As the great sage of the Evening News used to intone, ‘and so it goes.’