More on Sasso, a real smear artist, from Eileen McNamara of the Boston Globe:
boston.com.
Wrong man for Kerry
By Eileen McNamara, Globe Columnist
September 5, 2004
The general election campaign is underway, and John F. Kerry has figured out how to blunt Republican charges that he cannot be trusted, that he will say or do anything to win. He's reportedly going to lean more heavily for advice on one of the least trustworthy Democratic strategists to come out of Boston.
If Karl Rove and company can turn Kerry's distinguished military service and principled opposition to the Vietnam War into big negatives, imagine what they will do with the high-minded political tactics employed by John Sasso.
No doubt, this thought has not occurred to party insiders in Massachusetts. They have been toasting Sasso as a political genius for so long that they might have overlooked how his idea of good, clean fun will play in the heartland, where so many of those battleground states are to be found. It won't. His is exactly the wrong voice to be whispering in Kerry's ear now that America is back from the beach and paying attention to presidential politics.
Sasso began taking a more public role in the Kerry campaign even before the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and its Republican-backed smear campaign threw the candidate off-message and on the defensive. It was Sasso's signature on a fund-raising letter last month from the Democratic National Committee, accompanied by a machine-autographed glossy of Kerry and his running mate, John Edwards.
The problem with soliciting contributions to end the "smug and arrogant tactics of misinformation" that Sasso's letter rightly attributes to Republicans is that it only works when the purveyor holds the moral high ground. That would not be Sasso, he of the attack video that torpedoed the presidential campaign of Democratic Senator Joseph R. Biden of Delaware in 1987, he of the audiotape that ridiculed the physical disabilities of the wife of Edward King, Michael Dukakis's gubernatorial primary opponent in 1982.
Dukakis fired Sasso for lying about his involvement in the video, which showed Biden had borrowed without attribution from a speech by a Labor Party leader in Britain. He should have canned him for the crass assault on Jody King's dignity.
If Kerry wants to fight dirty against a Bush team that has gotten away with slinging mud across two presidencies, that's his choice. But no more whining, then, about the distortions of his military career. No more laments about how the media never focus on the issues. To choose Sasso is to choose the tactics Kerry claims to abhor.
On the other hand, if Kerry decides at this critical juncture to change the subject from the past to the future, he need rely on no one but himself. Is he as outraged as most Americans about health insurance, the cost of which is making young and old choose between food and medical care? Is he as worried as most parents about the quality of public education? Is he as frightened as most Americans about the course of the war on terrorism, the results of which have seen a resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan, chaos in the Mideast, and peace far from secure in Iraq?
If this is the most important election in our lifetime, John Kerry ought to run like it is.
Forget Vietnam; how is he going to get out of Iraq? How is he going to protect us from terrorists and still preserve our civil liberties? How is he going to return an economy bent on serving corporate slavemasters to serving the men and women who make it hum? How is he going to bridge a racial divide that has landed more young black men in prison than at any other time in our history?
These questions do not lend themselves to simple solutions. John Kerry has to be willing to lose some votes to answer them. One thing is certain: John Sasso will not help him. On Labor Day weekend 16 years ago, with his campaign foundering and the Bush machine taking huge bites out of his support, Michael Dukakis brought John Sasso back to rescue his presidential bid. He lost 40 states. |
