An August 14-17 poll of Ohio voters by Strategic Vision shows Bush/Cheney leading Kerry/Edwards by 49%-46%. But the trend since July 17-19th indicates that undecided voters declined from 8 to 5% and Kerry/Edwards increased from 44% to their current 46%
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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About Ramaswamy’s “Democrat Governor Playbook” Smear of Newsom
Vivek Ramaswamy is too young to remember George Wallace. I remember him well, which is why Ramaswamy’s snarky effort to compare Gavin Newsom to him drove me to a refutation at New York:
The last time tech bro turned politician Vivek Ramaswamy waded into American political history, he was touting Richard Nixon as the inspiration for his own foreign-policy thinking, so to speak. Unfortunately, he betrayed a pretty thorough misunderstanding of what Nixon actually did in office, not to mention somehow missing the Tricky One’s own role model, the liberal internationalist Woodrow Wilson.
Now the freshly minted candidate for governor of Ohio is at it again with an analogy aimed at Gavin Newsom that nicely illustrates the adage from This Is Spinal Tap that “there’s a fine line between clever and stupid.” He made this comparison on social media and on Fox News:
“I actually like Gavin Newsom as a person, but he won’t like this: there’s another Democrat Governor from U.S. history that he’s starting to resemble – George Wallace, the governor of Alabama who famously resisted the U.S. government’s efforts at desegregation. In 1963, JFK had to deputize the Alabama National Guard to get the job done, just like President Trump is doing now: – George Wallace fought against federal desegregation; Gavin Newsom now fights against federal deportations. – George Wallace wanted segregated cities; Gavin Newsom now wants for sanctuary cities. – George Wallace blocked school doors; Gavin Newsom blocks ICE vans. It’s the same playbook all over again: dodge the feds, rally the radicals, & do it in front of the cameras to pander to their base to carve out a lane for their presidential goals. And mark my words: Gavin Newsom’s presidential ambitions will end the same way George Wallace’s did – in the dustbins of history.”
Putting aside for a moment Ramaswamy’s dumb little quip about Newsom and George Wallace representing the same “Democrat governor playbook” (it would take all day simply to list the wild differences between these two men and the states and state parties they governed), his facile comparison of their stances toward the exercise of presidential power doesn’t bear any scrutiny at all. When George Wallace “stood in the schoolhouse door” to block the enrollment of two Black students at the University of Alabama, he was defying a nine-year-old Supreme Court decision, an untold number of subsequent lower-court decisions, and ultimately the 14th Amendment, on which Brown v. Board of Education was based. He wasn’t opposing the means by which the federal government sought to impose desegregation, but desegregation itself, and had deployed his own law-enforcement assets not only to obstruct desegregation orders, but to oppress and violently assault peaceful civil-rights protesters. That’s why President John F. Kennedy was forced to either federalize the National Guard to integrate the University of Alabama or abandon desegregation efforts altogether.
By contrast, Newsom isn’t standing in any doors or “blocking ICE vans.” The deportation raids he has criticized (not stopped or in any way inhibited) are the product of a wildly improvised and deliberately provocative initiative by an administration that’s been in office for only a few months, not the sort of massive legal and moral edifice that gradually wore down Jim Crow. And speaking of morality, how about the chutzpah of Ramaswamy in comparing Trump’s mass-deportation plans to the civil-rights movement? Even if you favor Trump’s policies, they represent by even the friendliest accounting a distasteful plan of action to redress excessively lax immigration enforcement in the past, not some vindication of bedrock American principles. No one is going to build monuments to Tom Homan and Kristi Noem for busting up families and sending immigrants who were protected by law five minutes ago off to foreign prisons.
As he made clear in his speech last night, Newsom objects to Trump’s federalization of Guard units and planned deployment of Marines on grounds that they are unnecessary abrogations of state and local authority transparently designed to expand presidential authority as an end in itself. George Wallace made defiance of the federal government under either party’s leadership his trademark. John F. Kennedy wasn’t spitting insults at him as Trump is at Newsom; he and his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, negotiated constantly behind the scenes to avoid the ultimate confrontation with Wallace. There’s been nothing like that from Trump, who has all but declared war on California and then sent in the troops to run Los Angeles.
Beyond all the specifics, you can’t help but wonder why the very name “George Wallace” doesn’t curdle in Ramaswamy’s mouth. If there is any 21st-century politician who has emulated the ideology, the tactics, the rallies, the media-baiting, the casual racism, and the sheer cruelty of George Wallace, it’s not Gavin Newsom but Donald Trump. I understand Vivek Ramaswamy isn’t old enough to remember Wallace and his proto-MAGA message and appeal, but I am, and there’s not much question that if the Fighting Little Judge of 1963 was reincarnated and placed on this Earth today, he’d be wearing a red hat and cheering Trump’s assaults on what he described as the “anarchists … the liberals and left wingers, the he who looks like a she” and the professors and newspapers that “looked down their nose at the average man on the street.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-4436481,00.html
“Democrats who say they are concerned with how the world views the nation have formed a group to run television ads and campaign against Bush. Advisers to the group, Safer Together 04, include former Clinton national security adviser Anthony Lake.
The group will run a TV ad starting Friday initially on cable channels in Washington, D.C., before expanding to battleground states next week. The ad, to air during the Olympics, features a lifelong Republican who says he won’t vote for Bush again. It counters an Olympics-themed ad Bush is running”
Its obviously beginning to happen. People are banding together is cells and are doing cooperative things to make this system work.
The scientists have also banded and are asking for a meeting with both Bush and Kerry. Kerry says he is ready. Bush’ team is yet to comment.
This is the best approach towards making things happen for November. Now, each cell and target a different message and a different sector of the electorate and yet, each cell’s message will cross fertilise because each segment of the electorate has multiple interests.
If this trend picks up momentum and is joined by the efforts from the 527s and the DEMs and the Kerry campaign, then the coming months will be full of great things. You can also bet that things will get so nasty that we might have to turn off the TV when the kids are around. Lies will flow like a stream after a torrent of rain and it will all add to the excitement.
In truth and in fact, if the cell concept of the Kerry supporters gets a roller coaster effect, then the republicans will have to rally their troopers quickly and get a response in place… and it just might be late.
I still think that the process must continue and that the rank and file still need to ensure that they chat a bit with the neighbours and the aunts and uncles and make sure that everyone gets a ride to a booth… there is must that can be done.. and I am sure that the rank and file will get even busier in the coming weeks.
I am enjoying the fact that there are a number of small groups (cells) who are carrying the message and refuting the Bush claims.
Cheers
heroditus, I wonder that, too. Another poll in Ohio has Kerry up 2 among likely voters, just like Gallup.
heroditus, I wonder that, too. Another poll in Ohio has Kerry up 2 among likely voters, just like Gallup.
Economist weekly poll out (Aug 16-18):
Kerry over Bush 48-41 in 3-way race.
See:
http://www.economist.com/media/pdf/YouGovG.pdf
Also, Bush has broken another barrier, down to 39% approval. If that holds, he’s sunk.
I would appreciate it if someone would discuss the credibility (or lack of it) of Strategic Vision polls. This is an out and out Republican outfit which has started deluging the world with its polls in the past month or so. It seems to me quite likely that it is just another arm of the Bush re-election campaign which has been assigned the task of making it look like he is not sinking like a rock. It bothers me that so many blogs seem to give it credibility. On Ohio, for example there are a number of other polls just out which show Kerry with a lead – in the case of Gallup a 10 point lead among registered voters. I think people should consider whether or not they want to give Strategic Vision any credibility and any publicity. I think it is a fraud.