Friday, October 27, 2006
Catching up ...
Catching up on events and posts that I missed over the past ten days or so: Deval's lead is now back to 25 percent? I'm not sure I've seen anything like it before. What the heck happened? What happened is that Kerry Healey always faced an uphill battle -- and then proceeded to wage one of the worst (forget the word 'negative' at this point) campaigns in recent memory. Sure, the coddles-criminals issue, as manufactured as it was, served as a surprisingly effective close-the-gap ploy. But the Healey camp somehow, it appears, convinced itself that it could be used as a central issue of the campaign. They lost perspective. They fell out of touch with voters. I mean, putting guys who look like skinhead neo-Nazis in prison garb and thinking it was clever? It's literally an insult to voters' intelligence. ...
... John had a good post on the Iraq war. My sentiments exactly. I was a Wobbly Warrior going into the war. But I had no idea how badly the administration would screw things up -- no WMD, poor or non-existent postwar planning, failure to anticipate, recognize and act against an insurgency, etc, etc., etc. A pragmatic reason for going into Iraq (WMD) has turned into a utopian debacle. The Realist Realists are now turning to Realist James Baker to devise a face-saving way to scram from Iraq. ...
Update -- It isn't all Mitt's fault. But he's contributed to the widespread notion that Republican governors are just in it for the next job. ...
Catching up on events and posts that I missed over the past ten days or so: Deval's lead is now back to 25 percent? I'm not sure I've seen anything like it before. What the heck happened? What happened is that Kerry Healey always faced an uphill battle -- and then proceeded to wage one of the worst (forget the word 'negative' at this point) campaigns in recent memory. Sure, the coddles-criminals issue, as manufactured as it was, served as a surprisingly effective close-the-gap ploy. But the Healey camp somehow, it appears, convinced itself that it could be used as a central issue of the campaign. They lost perspective. They fell out of touch with voters. I mean, putting guys who look like skinhead neo-Nazis in prison garb and thinking it was clever? It's literally an insult to voters' intelligence. ...
... John had a good post on the Iraq war. My sentiments exactly. I was a Wobbly Warrior going into the war. But I had no idea how badly the administration would screw things up -- no WMD, poor or non-existent postwar planning, failure to anticipate, recognize and act against an insurgency, etc, etc., etc. A pragmatic reason for going into Iraq (WMD) has turned into a utopian debacle. The Realist Realists are now turning to Realist James Baker to devise a face-saving way to scram from Iraq. ...
Update -- It isn't all Mitt's fault. But he's contributed to the widespread notion that Republican governors are just in it for the next job. ...
