Mickey Kaus boldly challenges the CW — offered recently by Bill Clinton, Evan Bayh, and the editors of The Note — that John Kerry needs to keep the focus on domestic issues, rather than on Iraq or the war on terror. Kaus thinks that’s wrong for various reasons, most of which come down to: “If you agree with Bush on terror, are you really going to vote for Kerry in order to reduce your Medicare bill?”
James Taranto, of Opinion Journal, thinks the “focus-on-domestic-issues” advice Kerry has been getting lately suggests something else: that some Democrats have already thrown in the towel, and so are now urging Kerry to pursue the strategy that will do the most help the party’s Congressional and Senate candidates. Perhaps this was what New York Magazine meant when it praised Taranto’s “combination of wit, engaging prose, and muscular (if sometimes twisted) logic.”
On the other side of the aisle, Noam Scheiber of The New Republic journo-scolds the Washington Post for letting the media off the hook too easily in its comparison of the anti-Kerry Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ads to the infamous Willie Horton ad that helped seal Michael Dukakis’s fate in 1988. There’s a difference, he argues, between an ad that is “vile and misleading but literally true,” (Horton) and an ad that’s both vile and misleading as well as being factally inaccurate (SBVFT). “In the first case, the media has an obligation to provide the context needed to assess the claim being made. In the second case, the media has an obligation to ignore the ad altogether so that it doesn’t become a part of mainstream political discourse.”
Meanwhile, Atrios’ well-documented disdain for Andrew Sullivan shows no signs of abating. Sullivan (who agrees with us about Begala and Carville’s conflicts of interest) seems lately to have resigned himself to not voting for Bush, but Atrios is a long way from rolling out the welcome mat. He hasn’t forgotten Sullivan’s offensive post-September 11th denunciations of “the decadent left in its enclaves on the coasts,” and labels him, “one of those people who should simply be shunned by all decent people.”
Hard-nosed Matt begs to differ. If someone agrees with you on something, he reasons, why condemn them for views expressed in the past? “If the Atrios Rules are going to be that no one is welcome in his coalition unless that person repudiates everything he’s said in the past and performs a grand ceremony of repentance, then the reality is that no one is going to join the coalition.”
As for Sullivan himself, he’s so far managed to resist returning fire on this one.
–Zachary Roth
Zachary Roth is a contributing editor to The Washington Monthly. He also has written for The Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, Slate, Salon, The Daily Beast, and Talking Points Memo, among other outlets.