Through the Looking Glass on the Massachusetts governational election race:
Yet in an important race in what should be a Democratic stronghold state, the professionals running her campaign aren’t stressing the issues, but are instead going straight for the sleaze. They have somehow convinced themselves that voters don’t want to hear which candidate supports government programs which actually matter to them, but could be motivated instead by hearing about factories in Nebraska in the 1980s. The latest “issue” they’re flogging to the press is an absurd claim that there were sexist implications when Romney described O’Brien’s attacks as “unbecoming”. “Unbecoming” is a fine word to use. For both of them.
And so it goes nationally. We have an administration with unpopular positions on the environment, business issues, and many other things, which is trying to gain power for its adherents in Congress by distracting the voters from real issues, turning politics instead into a debased freakshow of charges and countercharges. There are two messages here — one being that government is corrupt, and involvement with it is unbecoming (a truly fine word); the other, which comes through loud and clear on a network news whose coverage of “politics” and the legislative process is dominated by horse-race analysis and personal smears, is that this unseemly business has nothing to do with the voters. Which is wholly false. The horse-race analysis and personal smears may have nothing to do with the lives of the voters — but politics does. Very much.
Pandagon questions Forrester’s ad campaign:
No link, but Forrester is running ads now with newspapers basically saying, “We didn’t like the switch for Lautenberg, so, um…vote for Forrester.”
How bad of a candidate do you have to be when the sole bit of advocacy you can put forward on the part of newspapers is that a vote for you is a rebuke to someone else? I swear to God, give me a briefcase full of unmarked $20 bills, and I will run any Republican campaign into the ground. It costs less than what they’re doing now.