Tag Archives: campaigns

Real People, Real Issues

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

Living and working in Your Nation’s Capital I forget, sometimes, that grand issues are fun to debate on CNN or MSNBC, but real people deal with real issues.

At a fundraiser for Rep. Bill Johnson (R-Oh) last night, I heard from a nurse anesthetist that there is a continuing shortage of the basic drug she uses to put people to sleep for surgery. And that when they have the drug it often has a label written in some language other than English, and that the efficacy of the drugs is not constant. Continue reading →

Abusing Government Institutions: Part III

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON

“The word is out. He hasn’t paid taxes for 10 years. Let him prove that he has paid taxes, because he hasn’t.”

Those were the words of the Majority Leader of the United States Senate, Harry Reid, speaking on the Senate Floor, leveling an accusation against Gov. Mitt Romney that he could not prove, for which he offered no evidence, and had every reason to believe was not true.

Reid’s attack on Romney was clearly calculated to goad the Governor into releasing more income tax returns. The tactic is pretty transparent. A person of Romney’s wealth has to have something in his income, or his tax deductions or his charitable contributions to the Mormon Church, or something else that the Democrats could exploit. Reid, who is a wealthy man, of course, has never released his. Continue reading →

Running Mate Good Cop, Bad Cop

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

The best bad cop in American political history was Spiro T. Agnew.

He was the one who said that the media were “nattering nabobs of negativity,” called liberal intellectuals “an effete corps of impudent snobs”, and said of the Democrats, “They have formed their own 4-H club – the hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history.”

Agnew played the role to the hilt. He helped his running mate, Richard Nixon, looked moderate (which, of course, he was, on the domestic policy side of the equation). And because his comments were so exquisitely crafted, the press couldn’t help but print them.

The problem for Agnew is that he ended up actually being worse than a bad cop. He became a felon, and he had to resign his office so that he could spend some quality time in jail on corruption charges.

Agnew helped to define a new role for the Vice President. And that role was attack dog.

Continue reading →