New York’s U.S. Senate race is shaping up as a classic Republican challenge. Which is to say it’s starting dirty, will get dirtier and, of course, will thrust onto the back burner any actual issues. As I said, it’s vintage GOP politics.
District attorney and foxy cable-network pundit Jeanine Pirro officially announced Monday against Senator Hillary Clinton, meaning the family-values Republican-primary field is now populated by the son-in-law of a pardoned presidential felon (Edward Cox) and the wife of a convicted felon (hubby Pirro served just short of a year for tax fraud).
True to GOP form, Mrs. Pirro launched her campaign not by outlining ways to a brighter future for New Yorkers, but by slamming Hillary. It seems that local Republican operatives are deeply concerned that this high-ranking Democrat wishes to rank even higher and could, heaven forfend, put politics ahead of policy. This appalling specter has Mrs. Pirro deeply concerned as well. “Hillary Clinton is not running to serve the people of New York,” opined the deeply concerned Mrs. Pirro. “We are just a way station in her run for the presidency.”
Yep. On the other hand - and this is terribly cynical of me, I know - District Attorney Pirro herself has been higher-office shopping for some time now. According to (liberal media) reports, she tossed around the idea of running for state attorney general and even George Pataki’s job before landing on the U.S. Senate, which, I guess, had a nicer ring to it. But these what’s-good-for-the-goose things just don’t apply to Republicans. They have declared themselves immune from that sort of stuff - it’s so dicey, you know - and, well, that’s all there is to it.
Deeply concerned Mrs. Pirro was immediately congratulated on her decision to run by RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman. Allies like that will come in handy. For instance recently on "Meet the Press," Mehlman managed to take mounds of incontrovertibly damning evidence against Karl Rove and make it all sound as though the deputy chief of staff was the purest victim of a political set-up since Christ. So if Mrs. Pirro needs advice on how to combat criticism that she is doing essentially what Hillary is doing, she need only turn to Mr. Mehlman, the most hilariously brazen, in-your-face hatchetman alive.
“Clinton is so popular that Pirro can’t say, ‘She hasn’t done a great job for New York,’” observed Democratic pollster Celinda Lake. “The only thing you can say is, ‘She can’t continue doing a great job forever.’ Talking about 2008 will help with fund-raising, but it’s a pretty weak political argument.”
My dear, poor, naïve Celinda. Every Republican argument is a weak political argument. But each is made powerful by thunderous repetition, the cash to broadcast the thunder and an absolute imperviousness to shame. The state party organization has already guaranteed the deeply concerned Mrs. Pirro around $30 million in fun money, and that’s only the beginning. The national committee (remember Ken) will direct whatever is needed into Mrs. Pirro’s coffers, and every lunatic 527 in existence and some not invented yet will pile on. Before it’s all said and done, Hillary will have been electronically convicted of having committed every sin in the political book, from hiding indictable Whitewater records to hiding Saddam’s WMD.
A Mehlman sidekick, RNC hatchetwoman Tracey Schmitt, has already gotten the ball rolling. “It’s obvious that [Hillary’s] efforts to reposition herself as a centrist are the result of her political ambitions rather than principle.” That was a nice touch - that is, adding the “principle” argument to the ambition argument - especially since the (liberal) media reported that the deeply concerned Mrs. Pirro “repeatedly declined [Monday] to outline her positions on abortion, gay rights, Social Security private accounts and stem-cell research.”
Furthermore, “when asked if she considered herself a Bush Republican, [Mrs. Pirro] declined to embrace that description, too. ‘I’m going to be Jeanine Pirro - I’m not someone you can categorize as this, that or the other thing.’” - except as being deeply concerned.
George W. can’t be happy about that. He’s only a few months into his second term, just sitting there on all those piles of vaunted political capital, and here’s a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate acting as though the W. stands for “Who?”
All proof that God intelligently designed mid-term elections only as comic relief.