Category Archives: Politics: US: 2006 Election

A lot has been going on in Virginia. Turn out that my line (borrowed from an old T-shirt about Ed Meese) that Sen. George Allen is a pig just pre-dated the discovery that he’s an ethnically half-Jewish pig whose own mother was afraid to tell him about his ancestry for fear of his reaction. But Sen. Allen says don’t worry, he eats ham sandwiches.

For that, and many other things, the George Allen campaign is hurting. Here’s a good round-up of the latest. It begins like this:

“Some of this I’ve brought on myself.”

That’s it. That is the entirety of what Sen. George Allen had to say to Virginia voters last night about the several controversies that have dominated the campaign in the past few weeks. This, the senator’s campaign had announced, was going to be “an unprecedented two-minute statewide television address reaching out directly to Virginians.” Finally, it seemed, Allen was going to explain “macaca,” and his angry, defensive reaction to the public revelation of his Jewish heritage, and the various ugly accounts of his use of racist symbols and words over the years.

But no.

Jim Webb raised $3.5 million in the last reporting cycle, which is a lot less than Allen has, but much more than Webb has seen until now, and enough to get some serious media. (Allen has a cash mountain, but his staff didn’t release recent fundraising numbers, suggesting it’s maybe not going so great recently.)

The most interesting thing in the Post blog linked above is that the Allen campaign is working on shoring up its base, not contending for the swing voters. That’s a very defensive move and heartening, given that the two most recent polls show a tie and an Allen lead. I wonder if Allen’s polls tell a different story?

When it comes to that serious gut-check moment, Lamont shows that he’s just not tough: he’s willing to negotiate with terrorists. View it and weep:

Actually, this is a good commercial, but not a great one: the takeaway line is about negotiations; the issues discussed are mostly things that are state-level not federal. But it does help define the candidate as a good guy.

National Democrats are scared of making a fight against excesses against national security because they think that someone will call them weak. What they don't understand is that they look weak when they don't fight; and that Karl Rove is going to call them terrorist sympathizers anyways.

Enter Senatorial candidate John Tester. In a recent debate with incumbent Conrad Burns, there was this exchange:

Tester, who showed a fuller range of emotion in the course of the evening, probably found a sound bite moment in response to a Burns charge that he is “soft on terrorism.” Tester, Burns said, “doesn’t understand this enemy” and would weaken the Patriot Act. “Let me be clear,” Tester shot back sharply. “I don’t want to weaken the Patriot Act. I want to repeal it.”

The Burns people thought they had a great gaffe and ran with it, producing the classic candidate as horror-film monster advertisement with grainy pictures and scary music. It's pretty awful, but here it is:

Tester, to his credit, isn't backing down one inch and is airing this reply:

Obligatory sanity disclaimer: There are actually some pretty good things in the Patriot Act as well as some really bad things. On balance I'd rather not have it, but the best outcome would be surgery rather than euthanasia.

The Sunday New York Times Magazine has a well-written article by Matt Bai profiling DNC Chair Howard Dean and his 50-state strategy: spend less money on media and GOTV in the small number of seats that are known to be contested months before the election and instead build a fully national field organization. The article is entitled, The Inside Agitator.

I thought it was especially ironic to see public doubts being expressed by the people who’ve been losing elections year after year during the very weekend that Democrats are poised to pick up Mark Foley’s seat here in Florida. You need a full court press not only to keep the other side from being able to concentrate its money, but also because you never know where something could happen.

This is getting just plain weird. In the last 24 hours the Allen campaign has descended from off-message-frenzy and damage control to deep inside Bizzaro Land.

Item: The Allen campaign unveiled a tough commercial regarding Webb’s comments opposing the admission of women at the Naval Academy — in 1979. Indeed, there’s not much doubt in my mind that Webb was something of a sexist pig back then. His record as Secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration, however, suggests a changed man.

Item: In an effort to blunt all the awful stories about Sen. Allen’s racist past by playing “you’re another,” the Allen campaign dug up a guy who has the sort of story you wouldn’t believe while drunk:

Allen campaign officials to direct a reporter to Dan Cragg, a former acquaintance of Webb’s, who said Webb used the word while describing his own behavior during his freshman year at the University of Southern California in the early 1960s. Webb later transferred to the U.S. Naval Academy.

Cragg, 67, who lives in Fairfax County, said on Wednesday that Webb described taking drives through the black neighborhood of Watts, where he and members of his ROTC unit used racial epithets and pointed fake guns at blacks to scare them.

“They would hop into their cars, and would go down to Watts with these buddies of his,” Cragg said Webb told him. “They would take the rifles down there. They would call then [epithets], point the rifles at them, pull the triggers and then drive off laughing. One night, some guys caught them and beat . . . them. And that was the end of that.”

Cragg said Webb told him the Watts story during a 1983 interview for a Vietnam veterans magazine. Cragg, who described himself as a Republican who would vote for Allen, did not include the story in his article. He provided a transcript of the interview, but the transcript does not contain the ROTC story. He said he still remembers the exchange vividly more than 20 years later.

But wait! It gets better — the guy says has a tape of the whole interview — except that part. Truly a Rose Marie Woods for our times.

Note that Cragg says that he contacted the Allen camp before going public; they either encouraged him or didn’t try to stop him. This sort of garbage is the action of a desperate flailing campaign. Webb’s response (via a spokesperson), quoted in the Washington Post, is priceless: “In 1963, you couldn’t go to Watts and do that kind of thing. You’d get killed. So of course I didn’t do it. I would never do that. I would never want to do that.”

Item: And if that wasn’t strange enough, four — four! — independent sources (not part of the Webb campaign) have come forward to say … I can’t believe I’m typing this … George Allen likes to spit on women’s feet. I’ve got to wonder if this is relevant to his fitness to hold public office. It tends to show he’s odd; mean, even. And perhaps in these days of personality politics those who live by the nice guy image can fairly die by it.

You do have to wonder if we couldn’t somehow raise the tone just a little bit here.

Her name is Pat Waring, she’s 75 and lives in Maryland, and I believe her. She says she remembers the day vividly that some kid was throwing around the “n word” in a loud voice … a kid who grew up to be a Senator. See the video via Hardball with Chris Matthews, Woman says Allen used racial slur repeatedly or via YouTube.

One reason I believe this story is that I remember how shocked I was the first time I heard a live person (as opposed to a film) refer to blacks as “niggers”, in the early 70s — in Bethany Beach, Delaware.