Tuesday, April 20, 2004
Page 7
AFFAIRS OF STATE (Column)
Who’s Bedding Down Together This Election Year?
By DAVID KLINE
It’s amazing how an election year affects people’s minds. If politics makes for strange bedfellows, then election-year politics makes for full-blown orgies.
Consider, for example, that Democrats who hope to reclaim the presidency are happily badmouthing Ralph Nader, a man who has been on their side in just about every political battle in the past three decades.
When Nader appears at speaking engagements, he now is confronted by protestors holding signs telling him to drop out of the race. And these are the people who AGREE with his radical left-wing agenda!
In some states, Democrats are even said to be working on behind-the-scenes shenanigans to keep Nader off the ballot, just to make sure he doesn’t siphon any votes from Sen. John Kerry.
Of course, it doesn’t take much to thwart Nader, since his own campaign seems to be incompetent. In Oregon, a hopelessly liberal state, Nader’s campaign failed to get the measly 1,000 signatures needed to put his name on the November ballot. He could muster the support of only 741 Oregonians, so now he’s trying to get on the ballot by other means.
After what happened in Oregon, it won’t be surprising if Republicans in other states line up to sign Nader’s petitions to make sure he gets on the ballot. Sure, they disagree with everything he stands for, but it’s an election year, so that doesn’t matter.
Meanwhile, Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee (unless something goes horribly awry for him before the convention), has positioned himself so that he can win only if the economy goes down the tubes and more American soldiers get killed in Iraq. This brilliant campaign strategery is being used by a man who describes himself as a friend of the working man and a proud veteran!
President George W. Bush isn’t immune to election-year foibles, either. In January, Bush deserted his conservative base with an announcement that he supports soft immigration policies, including amnesty for some illegal aliens. Cynics view the announcement as a political calculation to encourage the growing population of Hispanic voters to join the Republican Party.
Bush also is campaigning on his signing of the Medicare Prescription Drug Act, the largest expansion of the national health care plan in its history. While this is something that Bush promised in the last election, the idea of adding a prescription drug benefit to Medicare was a proposal pushed by liberal activist groups for more than a decade. Now it is fodder for election-year ads for a “compassionate conservative.”
In the Medicare example, though, the strange bedfellows are tiptoeing to other bunks. Many of the liberals who supported the Medicare expansion for years now criticize Bush for signing a bill that accomplished that very goal. Why? Because it’s an election year, and they don’t want to give even a hint of support to someone who doesn’t share their views on other issues like abortion, disarmament and homosexual marriage.
And it’s only April! In the months left before we go to the polls Nov. 2, there will be many more instances of political pairings that even Gavin Newsom wouldn’t license. It’s up to us to determine whether these vote-seeking strategies succeed.
Copyright 2004, Metropolitan News Company