New York Times Trots Out Cleland Canard

Photo of Michael M. Bates.

"Obama’s Lobbyist Policy Excludes Cleland" was posted last night on the New York Times's "The Caucus" blog.  It relates that former Georgia Senator Max Cleland was disinvited from a Barack Obama fundraiser because the decorated war veteran is now a registered lobbyist.

The piece ends with:

As a surrogate for Senator John Kerry during the 2004 presidential campaign, Mr. Cleland often got marquee billing at campaign events, even landing a coveted speaking role at the Democratic National Convention. He lost his bid for a second term in 2002 after a Republican television advertisement depicted him as unpatriotic.

The assertion that Cleland's opponent in the 2002 election, Saxby Chambliss, challenged his patriotism is inaccurate.  Michael Crowley is senior editor of The New Republic, a magazine described by the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz as "left-leaning."  In an April 2, 2004 Slate article titled "Former Sen. Max Cleland: How the disabled war veteran became the Democrats' mascot," Crowley described what actually occurred:

Most famously, Chambliss ran a vicious ad on Cleland's homeland security votes featuring images of Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. In the popular liberal mythology, the ad disgustingly questioned Cleland's patriotism. "To this day I am motivated by—and I will be throughout this campaign—the most craven moment I've ever seen in politics, when the Republican Party challenged this man's patriotism in the last campaign," John Kerry has said.

But that's not what happened. The ad, though sleazy in its use of Osama and Saddam, didn't question Cleland's patriotism. It questioned his political courage and judgment. It focused narrowly on his behavior in office and his actual votes against the Homeland Security Department. With images of Bin Laden and Saddam flashing onscreen, a narrator declared that, "As America faces terrorists and extremist dictators, Max Cleland runs television ads claiming he has the courage to lead." The ad then listed Cleland's votes against the Homeland Security Department and said he was stalling "the president's vital homeland security efforts." It concluded: "Max Cleland says he has the courage to lead, but the record proves Max Cleland is just misleading."

Unfortunately, Cleland did a lousy job of responding to such attacks. As he was pummeled on national security—clearly the issue of the day as war with Iraq neared, Cleland stuck to stale Democratic themes like Social Security. Occasionally, Cleland and his supporters counterattacked, but they were ineffective.

Crowley's evaluation is correct.  Cleland's opponent questioned his judgment, not his patriotism.  The rest is a liberal myth, one still being circulated by the New York Times.
   


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Let me help the journalist

... he lost his bid for a second term after more voters voted for his opponent.

 

<insert witty signature here>

Helping a journalist

... he lost his bid for a second term after more voters voted for his opponent.

Don't know how to break this to you, but you have no future in the MSM.  

If Republicans were like Democrats ...

If Republican's were like Democrats, George Allen would be a poster boy for media bias.

 

If......

If you tell a lie often enough, it becomes the truth.  The NY Times, is obviously hoping that axiom is still true.  

Democrats: Stuck on Stupid since 2000.

Right PBthinker - and it has worked for them

There are lots of people that think Bush called people unpatriotic even though he never has and as specifically said that people have the right to protest and it's part of a Democracy. The dems imply all the time that he attacked their patriotism and he never has.

It's the same with the the Dems calling him a liar and saying there were no WMD's and no terrorist connections in Iraq and claiming that Libby and Cheney were responsible for the Plame leak even though the person who leaked it has been identified and has admitted it. They ignore the facts and just restate lies.

Liberals do that all the time and it works only because the media let them get away with it. It's disgusting

Axiom

The NY Times, is obviously hoping that axiom is still true. 

It's been workin' for them for years.  Unfortunately.

→ That's just cold

Michael, I know you didn't mean it, and my brain is probably more wired to the bizarre, but that headline . . . sorry, I can't stop laughing.

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Mundo Bizarro, Cool

It took me a while to figure out what you were referencing.

That was not my intent.

Congrats, however.  Realizing that your brain "is probably more wired to the bizarre" shows excellent insight.   :)

Cleland

This guy makes a great lightning rod for the Dems, for obvious reasons.

Ann Coulter will dare venture into that arena when the time comes. Few others will.

You're in good company, Michael. 

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Phil Gramm was right -- a nation of whiners

Swift boats, Willie Horton, Max Cleland, the list goes on and on ... the party that gave us the Goldwater mushroom cloud ad simply can't accept criticism of any kind. To them, all criticism is outrageous, and the degree of outrageousness doesn't matter. They're like a small child crying who cries that an older sibling was mean to them; when the trick works once, they'll whine constantly until the parents show that they're not falling for it.

Goldwater's mushroom cloud

"The party [Democrat] that gave us the Goldwater mushroom cloud ad" pulled it after a single showing.  Frankly, I never understood why its content was deemed beyond the pale in light of the tenor of campaign advertising over the ensuing decades.  After all, Goldwater was on record advocating the limited use of nuclear warheads in Southeast Asia for the purpose of creating a cordon sanitaire between North and South Viet Nam.  Dramatically and graphically illustrating the possible consequences of that proposal seems fair game.

Jer

The fabulous Jer

I haven't seen you in these parts for a while. Maybe I'm the one missing, and you've been here all along. Either way, I hope everything's OK.

Three points ...

  • Though it appeared once, so did the ad that took down IBM and launched Apple.
  • What mattered was not so much the actual ad, but the reaction to it. To place the ad in context, remember, this was still in the days when schools had "hide-under-your-desk" nuclear drills. And it ran only a couple weeks after Goldwater's acceptance speech at the GOP convention, when he uttered the phrase "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice." It was a lit match in a gas-leaking room. Once was enough.
  • Your point about it seeming tame because of what followed is rather disingenuous, because this was the ad that blew open the rules and allowed all those vicious ads to follow.

Of course, I'm mentioning the ad just for rhetoric's sake. The James Lynch ad would have made better grounds for hypocrisy.

KC...I just can't help myself

Until a few days ago I had not posted in a little over a month, and plan to only do so sporadically for awhile yet.  Actually, I had intended to take a complete break for at least five or six months.  After beating my head against a wall for much of the past year, it initially felt so much better when I stopped, but, as time went by, I realized I missed the wall.  [You have impressed me with your psychological insights., so what gives?...am I just a masochist at heart?]

But, back to the topic at hand:  You overstate my opinion of the "daisy" ad.  I didn't say, nor have I ever thought, its content was "tame".   By any standards of propriety which exist for political campaigning, it did indeed push the envelope.  But, in my view, it pushed within acceptable boundaries, and the Johnson folks unnecessarily bowed to GOP cries of "foul".  Despite it being quickly withdrawn, Republicans have now for over four decades defended their own occasionally questionable ads by repeatedly pointing to the "little girl picking daisies."  Tactics by Democratic operatives linking Bush with Byrd and racism to which fitz alluded are considerably more objectionable and less defensible. 

Furthermore, I think the floodgates for vicious campaign ads had already been blown open long before Goldwater/LBJ.  Many of the nineteenth certury campaigns for the Presidency were incredibly brutal affairs.  In the "modern" era, the use of propagandistic film to discredit a political opponent has been traced to the California gubernatorial campaign of Upton Sinclair (the target) in the 1930's.  

Finally, it wasn't just the ad depicting Cleland and Saddam Hussein and bin Laden with the veiled reference to "courage" that generated outrage on the part of his supporters.  It was the combination of a.) the ad, b.)Republican press releases that unfairly attacked Cleland [even Chambliss renounced them], c.)Bush claiming Cleland was more interested in politics than "national security" [even though Cleland had supported the President on the war and had advocated the establishment of a Homeland Security department while the administration was still opposed to it], and d.) conservative pundits like Ann Coulter cruelly mocking the legless Cleland's war wounds. 

The Byrd commercial was not one of the Democrats finer moments, and the same can be said about the Republicans' anti-Cleland campaign.

Jer  

Understood

You're asking me for psychological advice? Man, you came to the wrong place. I'm not allowed to psychoanalyze myself anymore, forbidden to do so after so many years of malpractice. If I could sue myself for clinical misdiagnosis, I probably would. And if I couldn't, my wife would.

But psychology aside, what's the fun of having a brain if you don't use it? And after a while, doesn't it get dull if you don't sharpen it? But it can be frustrating. I go out on other websites and I get the same in reverse. Every time I post something on Slate, in the "Fray," I almost always get a few smart ass answers, but occasionally I get a good challenge. I've noticed that it often depends on the author whom I'm posting about. If it's Dahlia Lithwick, the responses are usually smart ass. But when I post something by William Saletan, I get more respectful answers. They don't really agree with me any more often, but they tend to show more respect. Ah well ...

I'm not a big fan of TV political ads anyway. In my opinion, they're almost always cheap shots, because in 15 or 30 seconds, you can't offer anything but a cheap shot. And yet candidates spend all the millions that they've raised just on these drive-by cheap shots. I'm certain that the aliens who are monitoring Earth these days are refusing to contact us because we're so embarrassingly stupid. For some reason, we entrust our money to candidates, who give that money immediately to public relation hacks, who stage snapshot campaign slogans -- and we complain about them when they interrupt Laverne and Shirley reruns. Is this any way to select political leadership? Madison and Jefferson must be weeping over how shabbily we've treated their gift to the world.

Well, KC...whether

Well, KC...whether psychological, philosophical, or otherwise, your insights consistently make a lot of sense.  I just can't figure out why you end up with the "wrong" political conclusions. :-)

Jer

I always thought that the

I always thought that the anti-George Bush ad, featuring James Byrd's daughter, established an entirely new low.  Implying that Bush was racist for not supporting "hate crimes" legislation, and using the victim's daughter to call out the candidate personally was really cheap and dishonest...especially when you consider that Byrd's primary assailants were sentenced to death without the additional charges.

"Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it." -Ronald Reagan

fitzfong.blogspot.com

→ You always thought right

As if murder weren't already a "hate crime"

Personally, I woud think one man threatening to cut another's nuts off is kinda hateful, but I'm sure Jesse meant it in a loving way.  The accompanying gesture poves it.

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Oh nuts

Oh, yeah, the Most Reverend One felt so bad about it all that he jetted off to Spain to reflect on his misdeed.  And seek forgiveness no doubt. 

→ Rev. Jesse

Maybe he will appear on Imus to apologize.

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fitz... I never saw the

fitz...

I never saw the televised Byrd anti-Bush ad you describe, but I did receive a pre-recorded phone call which made similar allegations.  I'm in complete agreement with you--truly despicable.

Jer

Jer, The only times I

Jer,

The only times I ever saw the ad were when various news programs were discussing the relative merits of it.  But it had the same manipulative quality that the "if you're doing drugs, you're funding terrorists" had.  Effective?  Yes.  Distasteful?  Absolutely.

That said, along the lines of your Barry Goldwater point, do you remember the stunt Mike Huckabee pulled around Christmas?  He held a press conference where he announced he was not going to run a negative ad (I think it was about Romney...wasn't everything back then) his campaign produced.  Then he showed the ad to the media...knowing that they'd run it ad nauseum for free.  If he wasn't such a phony, he would have gotten a lot more mileage out of that stunt than he did.  Do you think Johnson's campaign was thinking the same thing when they ran the Daisy ad...pay for it once, get it run for free in perpetuity?

-fitz

"Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it." -Ronald Reagan

fitzfong.blogspot.com

Oh Clelan was a real piece

Oh Clelan was a real piece of work...

I remember all the BS he attempted to pull, using the msm constantly...I also remember how the man voted...

The NYTs and others can twist and spin in the wind all they want....enough people out here in the real world know exactly what happened, how he voted...and the people spoke...

Simple as that!

Deal with it you leftist agenda-driven twits.

"America isn't the problem...America is the solution." ~ Rush Limbaugh

Cleland's opponent

Cleland's opponent questioned his judgment, not his patriotism. 

As far as I'm concerned, if Democrats like Cleland and Kerry want to suggest that their "patriotism" was being questioned, we shouldn't back down like we have done in the past by correcting the premise.  I don't care whether their dishonest passive-aggressive technique is effective...we shouldn't backpedal by saying we questioned their judgment, not their patriotism.  Instead, we should ask Cleland apologists what part of Cleland's homeland security votes was "patriotic" and what aspect of John Kerry's selling out of Vietnam troops by lying before Congress was "patriotic". 

"Government's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it." -Ronald Reagan

fitzfong.blogspot.com