carville & co, are they kickin' a lil bush butt?

[frankiepop]

how long has carville and his gang of political thugs been on the job now? do you think these clinton maniacs are to be credited? i tend to believe that carville and co are responsible for turning around the flabby kerry campaign into lean and mean bush butt kickin' machine.

i suspect carville jumped on board after looking at bush's dismal approval ratings. these thugs must have thought, DAMN, this boob is beatable. it begged the question -- what's wrong here? it seems to only have taken them a couple of weeks & a debate to turn this around. kerry sounds on-message and on-point these days. he makes quick responses, no? ..........yes.

[crawjo]

I think the gains Kerry is experiencing now are due entirely to Bush's mistakes, and Kerry's strong performance in the first debate. I don't think campaign strategy has been very important in this latest surge.

[lynn]

I don't think that is quite right. There has been a change in the response time taken to address Bush's attacks. They are leaner, meaner and faster. The press is focusing on the Kerry camp's responses rather than Bush's empty assertions. No more mister nice guy. They are shutting Bush Cheney down. I can't wait until they start really throwing back the "Safer World" plank.

[Dr Dave]

All I can say is, whoever is running the Kerry Campaign these days had better be lean and mean. Bush is certainly skating close to the edge of the truth these days. To wit:

The New York Times
October 8, 2004
POLITICAL MEMO
In His New Attacks, Bush Pushes Limit on the Facts
By ADAM NAGOURNEY and RICHARD W. STEVENSON

WASHINGTON, Oct. 7 - From the beginning of the year, the White House has charted new ground with the sweep of its negative campaigning, starting with an $80 million wave of attack advertisements directed at Senator John Kerry that began the moment he effectively won his party's nomination last spring.

But the scathing indictment that Mr. Bush offered of Mr. Kerry over the past two days - on the eve of the second presidential debate and with polls showing the race tightening - took these attacks to a blistering new level. In the process, several analysts say, Mr. Bush pushed the limits of subjective interpretation and offered exaggerated or what some Democrats said were distorted accounts of Mr. Kerry's positions on health care, tax cuts, the Iraq war and foreign policy.

To cheers in Michigan, Mr. Bush asserted that under Mr. Kerry, the nation would have to "wait for a grade from other nations and leaders'' before acting to protect itself. Mr. Kerry has repeatedly said that he would not give up the right to act pre-emptively "in any way necessary to protect the United States,'' but has suggested that any president would need to demonstrate legitimate reasons for such an action.

To laughter, Mr. Bush said that Mr. Kerry would impose "Hillary care'' on America, a huge national health care program that would impose increased federal control over the health care decisions of citizens. Mr. Kerry's health care plan is significantly larger than the one Mr. Bush has offered, and it includes increased reliance on Medicaid and state health insurance programs for the poor. But unlike what Mrs. Clinton proposed in 1993, it would not create any big new federal bureaucracy and would retain the current employer-based system, and Mr. Kerry said he was averse to any kind of national health care plan.

To boos, Mr. Bush said that Mr. Kerry had set "artificial timetables'' for pulling troops out of Iraq, which the president warned would embolden the enemy and endanger the troops. In fact, Mr. Kerry said that he could envision beginning to withdraw troops in as little as six months, but only if he succeeded in moving Iraq toward stability, and has decline repeatedly to set a timeline.

Mr. Bush's aides defended Mr. Bush's statements, saying that the president had fairly spotlighted positions Mr. Kerry has taken over the years. "The campaign's criticisms of John Kerry are meticulous and precise and most of the criticisms involve reading back John Kerry's own words,'' said Steve Schmidt, a campaign spokesman for Mr. Bush.

But other analysts, including some Republicans, said Mr. Bush was repeatedly taking phrases and sentences out of context, or cherry-picking votes, to provide an unfavorable case against Mr. Kerry.

"So much of what they are indicting is taken out of context," said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, and the author of a book on negative campaigning. "It's a matter of taking sentences out of context or parts of sentences out of context. And it's hard for journalists to write the context back in because it takes time.''

Scott Reed, who served as manager of Bob Dole's 1996 campaign for president, said, "They are going right up to the line and they are pushing it hard.''

Mr. Reed said that Mr. Bush had not yet gone too far and praised the high-spirited attacks on Mr. Kerry as a tactical move, saying they would energize Republican base voters who had been dispirited by Mr. Bush's performance last week. But asked whether he agreed with Mr. Bush's characterization of Mr. Kerry's view on pre-emptive war, Mr. Reed responded, "No.''

The latest line of attacks by Mr. Bush comes during what has been a tumultuous week for him, amid signs that a once swaggering White House was getting worried.

Mr. Bush's aides said that he would raise many of the same criticisms of Mr. Kerry to his face in Friday night's debate. Still, the format might make that complicated. Mr. Kerry and Mr. Bush will be answering questions from an audience of voters and several analysts said that Mr. Bush would have to find a way to pivot into the kind of harsh attacks his aides have clearly concluded are necessary to defeat Mr. Kerry.

This muscular new speech was in many ways in keeping with what has been the tone of a campaign that has been unusually negative for an incumbent from the start and, some analysts said, reminiscent of the one Mr. Bush's father ran in 1988 against Michael S. Dukakis. The chief strategist in that campaign, the late Lee Atwater, worked over the years with key figures in this campaign, including Karl Rove, Mr. Bush's chief strategist, and Ralph Reed, a campaign adviser.

"Rove and Reed were schooled by Lee and he told them that what you do is you rip the bark off liberals.'' said Marshall Wittman, a former senior aide to Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican, and is registered as an independent. "Even if they're not liberals you rip the bark off them. That's what they are doing. "

Mr. Bush said that Mr. Kerry had voted for a tax hike "98 times'' and that he is "is one of the few candidates in history to campaign on a pledge to raise taxes.'' Mr. Kerry had said he wanted to raise taxes on the wealthy, but said he would not roll back the tax cut Mr. Bush gave the middle class, insisting to some skepticism, even among Democrats, that that would be enough to finance his own ambitious spending plans.

In his critique of Mr. Kerry's record, Mr. Bush has often left out facts that might make some of the Democrat's positions look different.

In one speech, Mr. Bush said in quick succession that Mr. Kerry had voted for higher taxes on Social Security benefits and voted for a formula that "helped cause the increase in Medicare premiums."

Mr. Bush's statements were technically correct. But the tax on Social Security benefits, adopted in 1993 over Republican opposition, helps to pay for Medicare, and without it the government would have to raise other taxes or add to the budget deficit. In voting for the Medicare formula in 1997, Mr. Kerry was joined by 43 Republicans.

Mr. Bush's statements criticizing Mr. Kerry's votes, said Robert Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a group that advocates fiscal responsibility, suggest that the president opposes the legislation in question, a stance that would leave Mr. Bush facing some very difficult political tradeoffs himself.

For example, Mr. Bixby said, "The increase in the Social Security benefits is dedicated to go to the Medicare Part A trust fund, and if you repeal that, you open up a giant hole in Medicare's finances, which are already badly underfunded."

On other statements, Mr. Bixby said, Mr. Bush was "flat out wrong," including the president's assertion that Mr. Kerry was "against all of our middle-class tax relief." Mr. Kerry has said he supported the extension of a number of tax-cut provisions aimed at the middle class that Mr. Bush signed into law this week.

On foreign policy, analysts said, many of Mr. Bush's assertions fall into a gray area between opinion and distortion.

By and large, said Walter Russell Mead, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, Mr. Bush was using "rhetorically aggressive formulations" but ones that got at "real questions about differences of policy between the two camps."

-30-

When your opponent is running a campaign like this one, you'd better come out with rhetorical guns blazing.

[patricia]

Absolutely. This is no time to be silent and assume that thinking people will, when listening to Mr Bush, dismiss his lies and partial truths and "consider the source". The "source" in this case is the Commander in Chief who led an ill-advised, costly war based on cherry-picked, or flat-out wrong intelligence, to further his advisors' long-held agenda. He then compounded the mistake by not immediately going to the American people and telling them that they are in the wrong war at the wrong time.
Now, thousands of lost lives and billions of dollars of destruction later, Mr Bush has dug in his heels, refusing to admit that he was duped by his advisors and that he was {gasp!!!] WRONG!!!
The question to which Mr Bush owes an answer to the American people is WHAT NOW??? He doesn't know. Anyone can see that in his eyes, although his speechwriters and advisors have tried to obscure his total bewilderment behind evasive rhetoric and his alleged charm. How long will the American people be fooled by that??

[RBS]

Alleged charm is just about right.

And I think frankiepop is right. I hadn't even thought about it, but it makes definite sense that Carville & Co. are behind all this! I also think that as the mess in Iraq worsens....

This might be the first time anyone has ever told George W. Bush, Jr. "no."

[lynn]

I could barely believe my ears yesterday when Bush admitted on camera that the weapons report supported the position that he was wrong regarding the Iraq weapons program. His cornerstone for war.

I see nothing ahead but more and worse coming from that camp in their effort to retain power in this country. They see a possible loss and that is not an acceptable outcome for the people who put Bush in the Whitehouse.

Any guesses about what the next round of ads will be? Swiftboat Grannies? Maybe they can get the 9/11 widows and orphans on board. I really don't think there is a bottom deep enough to which they would't dive.