Tuesday, June 29, 2004 :::
In case you haven't seen this: someone claiming to be from the Kerry campaign has been sending around an email starting as follows:Yesterday, the Bush-Cheney campaign, losing any last sense of decency, placed a disgusting ad called "The Faces of John Kerry's Democratic Party" as the main feature on its website. Bizarrely, and without explanation, the ad places Adolf Hitler among those faces.
The Bush-Cheney campaign must pull this ad off of its website. The use of Adolf Hitler by any campaign, politician or party is simply wrong. It concludes:P.S. It's hard to believe that the Bush campaign would use images of Adolf Hitler. See it for yourself: http://www.georgewbush.com. As Josh Chafetz says:Indeed, do see it for yourself, because here's what the ad is: It's a series of clips of Al Gore, Howard Dean, Richard Gephardt, and John Kerry making totally over-the-top denunciations of Bush. Interspersed are clips from MoveOn.Org ads comparing Bush to Hitler. The ad ends with, "This is not a time for pessimism and rage. It's a time for optimism, steadly leadership, and progress. President Bush."
This all reminds me a bit of an email I got in college, saying that the evil Republicans who had taken Congress had just voted down a measure which was simply the text of the fourth amendment. This, it was implied, meant that they didn't recognize the text as the fourth amendment, and that they opposed the fourth amendment. But think for a moment: why would Congress, in 1995, be voting on the fourth amendment? Wouldn't you vote against adding a law to the books that just duplicated what's already in the constitution?
Well, an acquaintance looked into it further and found that the amendment the Republicans had voted against was an amendment to gut an entire bill and replace its text with that of the fourth amendment. In other words, a vote for the amendment wasn't so much a vote for the text of the fourth amendment, it was a vote to gut an other proposal.
This is similar. Suppose the Bush camp did come out with an ad equating Kerry with Hitler. That might play well in certain hard-core conservative circles, perhaps as a fundraising appeal. But they're already focusing on the swing states. Is an ad from the Bush team equating Kerry with Hitler going to make a moderate, undecided voter start leaning toward Bush or against him? If I were with the Kerry campaign, and Bush -- or even his leading supporters -- made a Kerry-Hitler ad, I'd want swing voters to see it. Since I'm supporting Bush, and some of Kerry's leading supporters have equated Bush with Hitler, I want swing voters to know about it. Apparently, the Bush campaign is thinking the same way.
::: posted by Steven at 12:25 PM
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