Never underestimate a Republican's ability to divert attention away from the most pressing issues facing our country, and the media's ability to swallow the Republican spin hook, line and sinker
Who can forget a little over a year ago that the Republicans spent more time trying to find this woman...
...than this man.
And do you remember how the polls at the time showed around 80% of the country (I believe it was 82% in one poll) thought the Repblicans should leave Schiavo alone, yet the media kept saying the country was "deeply divided" over the issue?
Which takes us to Mike Allen's new article in TIME that Joe talks about below. First off, while Allen is correct in reporting that the Republicans have jumped all over the Lieberman loss in an effort to portray Democrats as soft on terror, I think Allen's article goes too far in buying the GOP spin. It's one thing to report, correctly, that Republicans are trying to use the Lieberman loss to their advantage. It's another thing entirely to buy into the Republican spin that the Lieberman loss is a disaster for Democrats (which the article implicitly does, the tone of the article is 100% that the Dems are on the defensive) and a boon for Republicans, and to say that the Republicans are right - namely, that Lieberman is, according to TIME, a "sensible centrist" (where did TIME pull that one from, unsourced of course so we KNOW it must be true), so Lieberman's detractors must not like sense or moderation, crazy leftists that we are.
Especially absurd is this paragraph in Allen's piece. The GOP really thinks that the local voters in Missouri are even going to know who Joe Lieberman is, let alone care what their Democratic state auditor thinks of some guy named Ned?
One of the nip-and-tuck Senate races this year is in Missouri, and backers of Sen. Jim Talent are preparing an attack on his opponent, State Auditor Claire McCaskill, that is emblematic of the sort that will be seen all over the country within 24 hours. "Does Claire McCaskill support the wishes of the angry left by endorsing Ned Lamont's candidacy or will she support the man who was chosen by Al Gore as the Democrat's 2000 nominee for Vice President?" the National Republican Senatorial Committee asks in a statement that will force McCaskill to talk about messy party business instead of her favored issues of government accountability and affordable health care.It's not going to force McCaskill to do anything. Rather than report this as some big bad "I gotcha" the Republicans just descended on the Dems, Allen and TIME could have followed that paragraph with the following:
Democrats say McCaskill won't be forced to do any such thing. Most Missourians have never heard of, and couldn't care less about, some guy named "Ned" from the northeast. What Missourians do care about are high gas prices, affordable health care, a faltering economy, and a seemingly unstoppable quagmire in Iraq. Invoking vintage Ronald Reagan, McCaskill will give her best "there they go again," and note that the "Terri Schiavo Republicans" running the Republican party and Washington, DC are obsessed with issues that have nothing to do with the major problems facing America today.Oh, but that would have made the article balanced. Silly me.
