More on Angry Democrats

Robert Novak writes an astoundingly myopic piece today on the current and constant Republican script; we Democrats have an irrational hatred of President Bush.  Of course it must be irrational; President Bush's actions deserve nothing but praise and admiration. 

The most myopic part of Novak's piece is his coverage of Max Cleland.

"Until 2002, Cleland had been treated gently by Republicans as a Vietnam War triple amputee veteran, and he never lost an election. This treatment enabled him to float in the Senate under the ideological radar, representing conservative Georgia while voting the straight liberal line. It ended two years ago with then Rep. Saxby Chambliss's Republican campaign, which pointed out that Cleland bowed to organized labor's demands to vote against the homeland security bill because of union representation questions."

Anybody familiar with the 2002 Georgia race in question has to know that there is a lot more going on than one vote. Indeed the Bush Administration set up an organized attempt to slander and slur Mr. Cleland. A more complete reading of that campaign might have included a certain ad put out by the Republican Party. Jim Boyd wrote an article for the Star Tribune on the subject.

"Take what they did to Max Cleland, for example. Cleland is a triple-amputee Vietnam veteran, former head of the Department of Veterans Affairs and for one term a U.S. senator from Georgia. Then the Republicans decided to do a number on him. In a hard-fought campaign for re-election, Cleland got everything the Republicans could throw at him, including the kitchen sink. His challenger was Saxby Chambliss, picked and managed by the White House's Karl Rove and Georgia GOP Chairman Ralph Reed. The absolute low point was a television ad which showed Cleland's photo together with those of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, equating the three. Cleland, the ad said, had shown his true colors by voting against homeland security. He was, the ad implied, unpatriotic.

Of course he wasn't. Through the long process of creating the Department of Homeland Security, Cleland had supported an alternative plan pushed by Democrats. It differed with the Republican version chiefly in the way it treated federal employees who are members of unions."

At any rate Mr. Novak is right that there exists a difference between the image that the party wants to portray to undecided voters and the image that the party loyalists would like to see. But this difference is not unique to the Democratic Party; President Bush is going to face the same problem when he finally holds his campaign.