All Hat No Cattle - D stands for Dumb-ocrat

Fighting political "untruthiness" before it was a word!

Daily Frontpage Archives Floridagate: Where It All Began You might be a right wing Republican if... Which Republican Congressman had a dead aide found in his office? Republican Presidential Quotations Bush-Cheney Political Contributions All Hat No Cattle - What the heck does it mean? Cream of the Crop Links T-Shirts, Mugs and More Please donate so I can put food on my family About AHNC Advertise on All Hat No Cattle Contact me

Commentary: In this election, the D stands for Dumb-ocrat
Joe Scarborough
News Journal correspondent

I have long labored under the assumption that when it came to running campaigns, the Republican Party was the dumbest political outfit in America.

This conclusion was similarly reached by thousands of Republican faithful, who reminded me daily when I was in Congress just how stupid my party was in its battles against Bill Clinton's public relations machine.

Even the 2000 presidential election was a botched spectacle that only ended well for George W. Bush after Democrats in South Florida proved too dumb to read their ballots.

But Election 2002 has crowned a new dunce in American politics. They are none other than Tom Daschle's Democratic Party.

Just as it was hard for Democrats to imagine how Al Gore lost the presidency to a man who knew far more about professional baseball than international diplomacy, FDR's party faithful must be wondering how they failed to perform better in a congressional election held in the middle of the worst economic downturn in a generation.

Bad voodoo economics

Over the past year, the stock market has plunged at record speed, deficit spending has exploded by $400 billion, unemployment has rocketed upward and consumer confidence has fallen to levels not seen in a decade.

Republican Party leaders passed and signed the biggest farm welfare bill in the history of the republic and expanded Washington's education bureaucracy at a record pace. Along the way, last year's projected $10 billion surplus vanished, and Washington spending exploded at the fastest rate since LBJ's Great Society introduced European socialism to American politics.

It's enough to leave you wondering if the party of Ronald Reagan still believes the government that governs least governs best.

So if these Republicans spent money like drunken sailors on leave, why did Daschle's Democrats fail to make the sort of political gains they were historically entitled to?

Because they were dumb. No. That's not fair. To be honest and accurate, they were monumentally stupid.

On domestic issues, the Democrats went from bashing Bush's tax cuts last year to running commercials this year praising them. They offered no economic alternative and were left saying those guys at Enron were real bad guys.

Bringing up the rear

Then came Iraq. Only Dick Gephardt saw the train coming last spring when he jumped out in front of his party and expressed support for the president's campaign against Saddam Hussein. The rest of the Washington Democrats flip-flopped through the summer and fall. By the time 100,000 left-wing protesters hit the streets of D.C. last month to stage Vietnam-style war protests, the American people were firmly behind their commander in chief.

Foreign policy fumbling aside, the Paul-Wellstone-Is-Dead pep rally put on by the Democrats last week was beyond tasteless. In the end, the prize most coveted by Democrats was not Paul Wellstone's Senate seat.

It was Jeb Bush's political head.

And while the party faithful whipped themselves into a frenzy long enough to believe they could beat the president's brother, Bill McBride ended up beating himself in debates and fumbling around when asked how he would pay for the policies he promoted.

Unlike most Republicans and Democrats campaigning across America this nasty campaign season, Jeb Bush actually told voters where he stood, regardless of whether they liked it or not.

And in this most cynical of campaign years, telling the voters what he believed actually made all the difference in the campaign.

Joe Scarborough is a former member of the U.S. House of Representatives who represented the Pensacola area in Congress.

http://www.pensacolanewsjournal.com

Advertise on All Hat No Cattle

Please support our advertisers. They are just a click away

Geri's Inland Seas

http://www.ptsdhelp.net/

Please support our advertisers. They are just a click away

Cyphernaut - Learn a Foreign Language Resource Site