Too Clever By Half - The Dems and Campaign 2006
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"Too Clever By Half" - this is a pungent Britishism, one of my favorites. It also summarizes why the Democrats appear to be in store for a major disappointment tomorrow.
Of course, they are clever. This clearly showed in the Delay scandal. Mr. Delay had a propensity to live on the edge in the pursuit of power politics, and his adversaries took advantage of it. A strategically timed indictment forced Delay to resign his leadership post and prevented the nomination of a successor on the Republican line. It also gave the Democrats a chance to play the ethics card.
In the meantime, the liberal propaganda machine revved up its effort on the issues of terrorism and Iraq, especially the denunciations of torture and spying. Prominent Democrats simply switched sides on Iraq as the lefty groupthink on the war gelled, and their nutroots activists extracted their pound of flesh with Joe Lieberman's primary defeat.
And entertainment was not neglected. The left offered circuses by getting a host of Washington power players to participate in their bizarre reality TV shows: Bush Kaused Katrina, Survivor: Who's Going Down With Rove? and the Hunt for Rumsfeld's Head.
Unfortunately, as Sherlock Holmes would say, they lacked the insight of the true artist - the knowledge of when to stop. They simply played the game too long with the same tricks. Which means the people had the time to deliberate, and that's when things started to look different.
The ethics ploy began to tank when people heard about Rep Jefferson and the 90K in his freezer. Mr. Abramoff was found to have distributed his largesse in a bipartisan fashion. Harry Reid had to explain away questionable real estate deals. Then the Rove affair was exposed to be a total contrivance by the Beltway insiders. Finally the Foley scandal REALLY put things in focus. After the shock wore off, people started asking: "Wait a minute, ANOTHER resignation where there is no time for the GOP to put a candidate on the ballot based on strategically timed release of info that had been gathered over months? This is starting to SMELL!"
Meanwhile, the hysterical rantings on security and Iraq were beginning to turn people off. The London terrorist arrests and the scope of the accusation behind it put both the "torture" and "spying" issues in proper perspective. And people began to notice the Democrats had no plan on Iraq except for the self-contradictory assertions that we don't have enough troops and have to pull out the ones we have.
The electoral season closed with the Kerry gaffe, which is the kind you expect from someone who's too clever by half. And then there was that timely exposure of the prominent evangelical Rev. Haggard. If the MSM hoped it would depress the evangelical vote, it looks like they're in for a disappointment. But anyone who knows about Christianity knows that church leaders have been a problem since, like, the Apostles, and that the believers carry on regardless.
Is it any wonder why Republican voters, independents and pro-security Democrats are going our way??!!