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Politics : Bill Clinton Scandal - SANITY CHECK -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Zoltan! who wrote (55563)	7/7/1999 12:12:00 PM
From: Les H	Respond to of 67261

THE DEMOCRATS GO INSANE By Dick Morris HAVE they replaced fluoride in the Washington, D.C., water supply with sterner stuff? Like LSD, for example? The Democratic Party seems to have gone collectively crazy in the past week or so. Consider the clinical evidence: Just when his wife is straining credibility by running for Senate from New York and trying to make us believe she has loved us all along, her husband lets slip to his friends and staff that he is thinking of running for Senate too - from Arkansas. This is the triangulated marriage. She'll live in New York. He'll live in Arkansas. They'll meet in Washington! Then, just to rub it in, Clinton goes to a baseball game for maybe the fifth or sixth time in seven years and guess which team he sees? The Chicago Cubs! You remember, the Cubs, the team whose hat Hillary proudly wore before she donned her New York Yankee hat. Forget that Hillary posing in a Yankee hat presents an image almost as ludicrous as Mike Dukakis standing in a tank. Does her husband have to remind us of her true, prior loyalties? To prove that he is not just picking on his wife, the president grouses loudly enough to his staff to get out the word that he is unhappy with Gore's criticism of his affair with Monica. It's a shot across Gore's bow to warn him: Don't mess with me! Soon Al will wake up in bed with a dead fish and a note which says "Al Gore sleeps with the fishes." Gore shoots himself in the kneecap, the foot and the pelvis by hiring new consultants who are sworn and mortal enemies of one another. He hires Carter Eskew - who parted from the firm of Bob Squier with bitterness and mutual reproach - to work with Squier on the campaign. Gore might as well hire the Albanians and the Serbs to work together. Then he supplements his cast of two pollsters with three more. Forget about the Bradley and Bush threats. Gore's guys will exhaust their talents leaking on and sabotaging each other. In my book "The New Prince," I point out that the most lethal wounds in politics are inflicted from the rear. Watch your back Al, these boys will leak that your campaign is in disarray and blame each other. You'll suffer, but they won't much care. Bradley announces that he's raised $11 million. That's only $7 million less than Gore. When you count the higher cost of moving a veep around the country (Secret Service and all), the gap is really a lot narrower. So, all of a sudden, Gore has a life-or-death primary battle. Polls show Bradley only 11 back in New Hampshire - easy ground to make up - and tied in Massachusetts. Meanwhile, Bush has raised $36 million and his closest rival, Elizabeth Dole, has raised $3.3 million - a tenth as much. The GOP, with no incumbent presumptive heir apparent, looks like it will have no real contest while the Democrats have created a bitter fight. All this is against the backdrop of Bush's excellent campaign beginning. Any party candidate who shifts the paradigm of his own party has a huge edge in the general election. Look at how Blair gained the upper hand in Britain by moving the Labor Party away from union control. Clinton, in 1992 and 1996, gained enormous support by pulling the Democratic Party to the center. Bush is doing the same thing with the Republicans. Cynics could dismiss the Bush move as an act - until he showed real class and extraordinary courage by going to California and disavowing the last two ballot initiatives that passed with overwhelming Republican support - the ban on affirmative action and the elimination of public services like schools to illegal aliens. W, as he is called, had the guts to go to California and endorse the essentials of affirmative action - no quotas but increased minority recruitment - and to support public education for the children of illegal aliens. Wow. We have not seen that kind of stand-up politics in quite a while in America. Democrats can only console themselves in the fact that Bill Clinton has had a heck of a week. He proposed major new programs to protect Social Security, expand and reform Medicare, insulate companies from frivolous lawsuits over the Y2K issue, and pay off the national debt. He even showed receptivity to a GOP-sponsored tax cut. I guess it was the water supply and its new additives that induced Vermont's Sen. Pat Leahy to sniff that he hoped that Clinton's cooperation with the Republicans would not bring back triangulation - let's just bicker and feud instead. The only good news of the week for Gore was that the Bush camp indicated that it might refuse federal matching funds and the ceiling on campaign spending that goes with it. Clinton should have followed this same course in 1996 and would have avoided much of the campaign-finance scandal that engulfed him after the election. If Bush turns down federal matching funds, Gore can justify doing likewise. Then he can really focus on raising money, bust the caps, and spend what it takes to get back in the race. Gore can raise any amount he wants if he really works at it. After all, he still is the vice president and Clinton is still the president. He has a lot of clout which he can put to good use raising funds. There is nothing wrong with Gore's campaign that a good, heavy media program wouldn't set right in a hurry, assuming his consultants don't kill each other off trying to get control of the campaign.