Category — Just One Thing

You couldn’t blame a voter for being cross-eyed and woozy from paying some attention to the race for the Republican nomination for attorney general.  The 2010 edition of Martha Dean is very different from the version that ran for attorney general 8 years ago.  She’s made some reckless charges against her opponent, Ross Garber, (he’s not a mob lawyer) since the May convention, so she invited a counterattack.

Garber, who tries to present himself as the serious-minded candidate in the contest, has burst the bounds of credibility with his claims that Dean wants to open some spigots and let heroin and cocaine flow.

If you read just one thing about the race, it should be the Journal Inquirer’s Chris Powell on Garber’s campaign and broader record.  The essential point:

Garber well may be as clever a lawyer as Dean but he earned his renown entirely as office counsel for Gov. John G. Rowland in 2004, when Garber strove to contrive excuses for kickbacks, to impede the General Assembly’s impeachment investigation, and generally to prevent the public from learning about its own business. Garber’s work was not a matter of criminal charges, against which everyone is constitutionally entitled to a vigorous defense. Rather, it was a civil and political matter, a matter of open government, with Garber doing his best to defeat open government.

Neil Newhouse and Glen Bolger explain it all to us in Sunday’s Washington Post.  While the piece is based on their experience polling for two recently successful Republican campaigns, McDonnell in Virginia and Brown in Massachusetts, it strikes me that some Democrats might prosper by adopting pieces of the strategy.  None of it will work without checking the first box:  You must have quality candidates.  Republicans don’t hold the patent on those.

Between now and November, plenty of Republican hopefuls will reveal themselves as hopeless as a Coakley.

We’ve seen dramatic shifts in the popularity of parties and presidents in the last few decades.  Something different that Bolger and Newhouse suggest is that negative advertising may be diminishing as a tool of political discourse and persuasion.  What will campaigns do with all those grainy photos of opponents they’ve collected?  Who will employ the menacing voice talent?

UPDATE: Neil Newhouse says in an email that negative advertising still works, but not if it’s perceived as “desperate.”

Christopher Hitchens can get on one’s nerves, but he does entertain when he’s locked and loaded.  In this month’s Vanity Fair, he gives Gore Vidal his due and then dissects his craziness.  It’s worth reading for this sentence:

Who but Gore could begin a discussion by saying that the three most dispiriting words in the English language were “Joyce Carol Oates”?