D-Day Has Arrived

The day I have been waiting for for the past four years has finally arrived. I just hope that it avoids a long drawn out legal battle and that Kerry is able to win both the popular vote and the electoral college. I have high hopes for that to come true, but anything can still happen.

I am surprised though at some of the things that did not happen in this election. For the first time in perhaps 20 years, there hasn’t been a bimbo factor in this campaign. In 1988 we had Gary Hart and Donna Rice, in 1992 there was Bill Clinton and Jennifer Flowers, in 1996 Bill Clinton and Paula Jones and in 2000 the Monica Lewinsky scandal hung over the campaign like a vulture waiting for it’s kill. Back in February, people like Matt Drudge and other GOP surrogates tried to pin an extramarital affair on Kerry with a former staffer of his that he supposedly forced to move to Africa to avoid the press. But the ridiculousness of such a story caused it never to waste a drop of ink and instead wasted electrons on the internet. But in case you didn’t notice, all of the candiates afflicted with the bimbo factor were democratic, some going down in flames (Hart and Gore) and Clinton making it to the finish line both times. While perhaps their was truth to these events, it seemed that the Republicans had almost come to expect such scandals in every election to help divert attention from the political platform that their party wanted to exercise in the White House.

For once the Republicans were not successful at pinning a personal scandal on the democratic candidate, perhaps because they were so focused on protecting President Bush from so many potential scandals throughout the course of the campaign (ie. faulty intelligence on Iraq, outting of CIA agent Valerie Plame, lying to Congress about the prescription drug benefit, Paul O’Neil’s book, Richard Clark’s book, Bob Woodward’s book, the daily news on Iraq, missing explosives, the Halliburton contracts, Dick Cheney’s energy task force and so on and so on and so on…). I think it says a lot for the integrity of John Kerry, and the fact that old tricks do not always work.

Of course, this is 2004 and the campaign has been the most intense election in generations. While both parties are guilty of stretching the truth and employing sleaze in their effort to win over votes, the Republicans in my view have come out the champion every time. Probably the dirtiest tactic had to be the Swift Boat ads that showed Vietnam veterans denigrating (Bush’s favorite word) Kerry, saying that Kerry did not deserve the three Purple Hearts and Silver and Bronze medals he had earned for his valor in combat. The problem was that some of these same veterans had praised Kerry in his re-election bid to the Senate in 1996. How eight years is enough time for them to suddenly lose their memory is a mystery to me, but that and the fact that this took place in the summer perhaps left enough time for Kerry to recover and regain his footing.

With the Swift Boat incident aside, the other sleaze factor that took precedence in this election was Bush’s painting of Kerry as an incompetent, unclear and out of the mainstream liberal from Massachusettes (I’ve heard this somewhere before from another member of the Bush family….hmmmm), almost creating a cartoon figure in the eyes of the uninformed electorate. By the time the debates came along, the bar had been set so low for Kerry, that it was felt that Bush would breeze through the three debates and the final two weeks of the campaign would be a cake walk. How ironic for a man that found himself in the same position four years before in his debates against Gore. Bush had set the bar so low for himself then, that the fact that he was able to visually hold his own was enough for him to be declared the victor by the press, despite the fact that Gore dominated on substance and issues. But then again, image is everything in presidential politics.

So the same happened to Kerry, although if anyone had bothered to look back on Kerry’s debating history and his oratorical skills, the outcome should have been anything but surprising. Instead of the cartoon figure created in the mind of many voters, the electorate saw a smart, commanding and silver-tongued politician deliver a clear and concise message, with Bush instead being the cartoonish muddled figure. It is true that the Bush campaign attempted to lower the bar again for Bush by calling Kerry the “best orator since Cicero”. But it was too late, with the Bush campaign’s caricature of Kerry crashing down all around them. Before the debates, Bush had supposedly taken the offensive, thanks to the parade of Kerry bashers at the Republican National Convention and his approval and poll numbers breaking away from the democratic candidate. But the debates were not a cake walk, instead turning the election on a dime and bringing the polls back to where they were before both the Democratic and Republican conventions. Bush had shot himself in the foot in the first debate, perhaps causing too much damage to recover in the remaining two.

But it now comes to the point where Kerry has a very serious chance at becoming the 44th president of the United States. Happy days could possibly be here again if that does happen, although with a Republican controlled congress likely to be branded as a “do-nothing” congress, this election could just be a prelude of the fun to come.