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by Tom Teepen
As the fictional but sage Mr. Dooley wisely noted, "Politics ain't beanbag." Especially the way the Bushes play it.
Never mind their patrician lineage. These guys are gutter fighters and the president's reelection campaign is extending the family's skill at first creating phony versions of its opponents and then running against the fake.
A study by the Washington Post finds that while both camps have mixed sweet and sour in their TV ads, Bush's commercials have been negative three-fourths of the time, far more than John Kerry's.
Kerry is a long-time, notably serious U.S. senator, but to hear the Bush campaign tell it, he is a laughably flip-flopping, left-wing loon. He wants to counsel Osama bin Laden, not fight him. Doesn't think there is a war against terrorism. Would repeal the Patriot Act and is straining to increase everyone's taxes. He even wants to add 50 cent a gallon to the gasoline tax.
All of this is dead false.
Far from wanting to raise taxes, Kerry has proposed only repealing the Bush tax cuts for incomes of more than $200,000 -- to help pay for the war against terrorism, not to stop fighting it. The gas tax idea was one he kited 10 years ago in utterly different circumstances and doesn't support now. Some flip-flop.
Ah, but didn't Kerry try to cut $1.8 billion from the intelligence budget and vote against several new weapons proposals?
He did indeed. But when he voted to nick the intelligence budget, congressional Republicans were proposing a $3.8 billion cut. And Dick Cheney, in Congress at the time, voted against many of the same weapons Kerry opposed.
And rather than repealing the Patriot Act, Kerry has proposed only -- and quite sensibly -- installing closer judicial supervision for some of its provisions. (A nuanced position, but Bush -- proud C student -- has boasted that he doesn't "do nuance.")
The list goes on. This is politics at its most cynical, taking advantage of the fact that most voters don't do detailed political research and, honest themselves, want to believe others are being fundamentally square with them, too.
Bush the Elder whomped Michael Dukakis for the presidency in '88 in part by recasting the Massachusetts governor -- a moderate technocrat indifferent to ideology -- as the next thing to a flag-hating extremist. A concurrent whispering campaign hissed about Dukakis's "foreign" name -- a bit of nastiness echoed this time by the project to put across the idea that Kerry somehow "looks French," whatever that means.
And the current Bush won the presidency in part thanks to a smear that Al Gore was a serial liar and exaggerator. Every one of the charges was either false or grossly distorted.
Presidential candidates typically have opponents. The Bushes have boogeymen.
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