what's happening to Politics and Campaigns?

[ButterflyBlood]

It seems every other thread there is now "Dean/Kerry is the Antichrist who rapes little girls every night and is planning with Bush and Ashcroft to instal monitoring chips in every human's skull!"

I'm wondering how many of those are trolls since the attacks are just getting silly. Everyday a new claim about how Dean or Kerry is to the right of Bush.

[punpirate]

1. Unfortunately, it's a kind of bickering...

... that is bound to develop when the Democratic Party cannot promote a candidate who stands so far above the competition that universal appeal overcomes differences on single issues. One can see in the complaints reverence for one candidate or another, each of whom have only marginal appeal to many others. It's a sign of the degree to which the Democratic Party, as a whole, has become fractionated.

Complicating this is some considerable partisanship based upon what a candidate is saying now, rather than on individual voting records. It's fair to attack Bush on his record, and to compare his record to his campaign rhetoric, and the same should be true for each of the Democratic candidates. Again, unfortunately, too often, whenever someone here uses a candidate's record in a disparaging way, that candidate's supporters counter with, "but, he says...."

The true substance of a candidate is his or her record, how he or she has voted on an issue, not what is being said. Had more people in this country looked carefully at Bush's record, his history in and out of government, we might have been spared the last very difficult thirty-one months. One could have imagined that, for instance, there would be a national "Clear Skies Initiative," because that's exactly what Bush pushed for in Texas. One could have predicted massive, destructive tax cuts (plural), because that's exactly what Bush did in Texas.

Politicians are measured by their votes and the policies they promote through legislation or policy-making. As a nation, we seem to have forgotten that, and believe that words of qualification mitigate and ameliorate a bad vote. We have come to believe in words rather than actions. I repeat Molly Ivins' dictum regarding Bush very often in these forums: "Watch what he does, not what he says." That should be a standard by which all politicians are judged.

Cheers.