The “General Betray Us” ad in the New York Times reminds me of the new Osama Bin Laden video. They are both astonishingly revealing of the minds behind them, and their lack of connection to reality. The smug fantasies that have captured the minds of moveon.org and Al Qaeda have made them oblivious to the effect their propaganda has on its target audience. The George Soros funded moveon.org is a major contributor to the Democratic Party. I quote: “In the last year, grassroots contributors like us gave more than $300 million to the Kerry campaign and the DNC, and proved that the Party doesn’t need corporate cash to be competitive. Now it’s our Party: we bought it, we own it, and we’re going to take it back.” That is hyperbole of course, but not nearly as untrue as Moveon’s portrayal of General Petraeus as a liar and a traitor. I am becoming more and more optimistic about the GOP 2008 electoral chances.
If anything can swing the elections in the Republicans’s favor, it is attaching the image of wacko defeatism to the Democrats. That’s not the brand you want to have in an American election. My father, a life-long liberal, voted for a Republican for President only once in his life, and that was a vote for Richard Nixon over George McGovern. This, in spite of the fact that McGovern and my father were both WWII B-24 bomber pilots, and that George McGovern was a personal friend of my Dad’s brother-in-law, my uncle Fred.
The majority of Americans are not in the get-out-of-Iraq-now-at-any-cost camp, but the majority of Democratic primary voters are. This makes being a Democratic Presidential candidate a slippery, treacherous proposition. Hillary Clinton has navigated these rapids, so far, with almost super-human agility, but the upcoming white water of the general election will make the primaries look like ripples in a pond. As General George Patton said, “Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser.” In spite of the inroads made by decadence over the last 60 years, I believe that is still the case. When Clinton goes up against Giuliani or McCain or Thompson, we shall see whether it’s still true or not.