Posted on 10/18/2004 11:29:48 AM PDT by mtp
ctober 18, 2004 OP-ED COLUMNIST The Lowest Blow By WILLIAM SAFIRE
ashington
The memoir about the Kerry-Edwards campaign that will be the best seller will reveal the debate rehearsal aimed at focusing national attention on the fact that Vice President Cheney has a daughter who is a lesbian.
That this twice-delivered low blow was deliberate is indisputable. The first shot was taken by John Edwards, seizing a moderator's opening to smarmily compliment the Cheneys for loving their openly gay daughter, Mary. The vice president thanked him and yielded the remaining 80 seconds of his time; obviously it was not a diversion he was willing to prolong.
Until that moment, only political junkies knew that a member of the Cheney family serving on the campaign staff was homosexual. The vice president, to show it was no secret or anything his family was ashamed of, had referred to it briefly twice this year, but the press - respecting family privacy - had properly not made it a big deal. The percentage of voters aware of Mary Cheney's sexual orientation was tiny.
But Edwards's answer in the vice-presidential debate raised that percentage. Because Cheney refused to react and the media did not see the spotlight on lesbianism as part of a political plan, the opening shot worked.
Emboldened, members of Kerry's debate preparation team made Mary Cheney's private life the centerpiece of their answer to the question, especially worrisome to them, about same-sex marriage. Kerry was prepped to insert her sexuality into his rehearsed answer: "If you were to talk to Dick Cheney's daughter, who is a lesbian. ..."
But in this second time around, the gratuitous insertion of Cheney's daughter into an answer slipping around a hot-button social issue revealed that it was part of a deliberate Kerry campaign strategy.
One purpose was to drive a wedge between the Republican running mates. President Bush supports a constitutional amendment limiting marriage to a union of a man and a woman; Cheney has long been on record favoring state option, but always adds that the president sets administration policy. That rare divergence of views is hardly embarrassing.
The sleazier purpose of the Kerry-Edwards spotlight on Mary Cheney is to confuse and dismay Bush supporters who believe that same-sex marriage is wrong, to suggest that Bush is as "soft on same-sex" as Kerry is, and thereby to reduce a Bush core constituency's eagerness to go to the polls.
The pro-Kerry columnist Margaret Carlson put her finger on it, finding that Kerry and Edwards "realize that discussing Mary Cheney is a no-lose proposition: It highlights the hypocrisy of the Bush-Cheney position to Democrats while simultaneously alerting evangelicals to the fact that the Cheneys have an actual gay person in their household whom they apparently aren't trying to convert or cure." (Italics mine.)
After the outspoken Lynne Cheney blasted this unsought intrusion of her daughter's private life as "a cheap and tawdry trick," the Kerry campaign hustled forward John Edwards's wife to charge that such motherly outrage "indicates a certain degree of shame with respect to her daughter's sexual preferences."
Worse than insensitive, that shot was off message, peeling the veneer off the Kerry-Edwards justification for making Mary famous: their oleaginous claim that, gee, they were only complimenting Dick Cheney for his fatherly tolerance. The crusher to that pretense came when the Kerry campaign manager, Mary Beth Cahill, coolly announced that the Cheney daughter was "fair game."
Apparently the American public thinks otherwise about the campaigning children of candidates. When polls showed two-to-one disapproval of the calculated Kerry-Edwards abuse of the young woman's privacy, the Democratic strategists who concocted this base-suppressing dirty trick orchestrated a defense that it was Dick Cheney who "outed" his daughter months ago. They are advising Kerry that he would look weak or, worse, slyly manipulative were he to apologize for tagging the Cheneys with the word "lesbian" before 50 million viewers.
Kerry will, I hope, assert his essential decency by apologizing with sincerity. Other Republicans hope he will let his self-inflicted wound fester. They have in mind a TV spot using an old film clip of a Boston lawyer named Welch at a Congressional hearing, saying "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"
Only if you promise to stop making up your own headlines when posting.
Please post with original title.
don't let him what? apologize? No one would believe him if he did.
Add Safire to the list of Mary Cheney users. No surprise.
And "nouveau" smarm at that.
Kerry is a dirtbag. He proves it almost daily.
Do you think this was typed with a straight face?
I think you accidentally posted to the wrong news group.
Mr. Safire does America a service by pointing out Kerry's lust for power.
What was the original title of this article?
What do you mean?
Only a liberal like Safire could ever accuse the likes of Kerry of having any essential decency to assert.
Please don't let who, what?
Isn't it interesting that the "champions" of the so-called party of Tolerance are always the ones to raise the issue of Morality. Where was this outrage when Bill Clinton was turning "the people's house" into the people's cat-house? I don't care what Mary Cheney does, as long as she doesn't vote for John Kerry (I guess that's not a problem, now.). For that matter, I don't care what Barney Frank does, as long as no laws are broken. Unfortunately, he will very probably vote for Kerry.
It would seem that those who have the most to say about Intolerance are also the ones who have the biggest problem with it. Robert Byrd is still the same guy who was in the KKK in the mid-'40s and FDR was the President when a ship-load of Jews was denied entry into the U. S., and sent back to Hitler's Europe. We in the Republican Party aren't making a lot of noise about it because we have nothing to be ashamed about or atone for.
You're so clueless on this issue you don't even realize that you are the only person on Free Republic who sees it the way you do.
Pointing out the Kerry campaigns deviousness is a good thing to do.
You are being ignored, in case you hadn't noticed.
Service or no service, he is USING Mary Cheney just as Kerry did. It's tacky. The reason behind the use is irrelevant.
I'm sorry, but that's one of the nuttiest things I've heard around here in a long, long time. What Safire is doing is analyzing a political move by Kerry and exposing it for what it is. That is not use, abuse, exploitation, or anything like it.
Essential decency? John Kerry? Sorry, that dog won't hunt. This guy doesn't have a decent bone in his body. He's the One Musketeer...all for John and John for John.
He's not using MC, you are mistaken. He is pointing out Kerry's dirty trick.
Any refence to Cheney is by way of telling the story...not trying to seperate an opponent from his his base by using his daughter against him.
A few of us here on FR that night wondered why "Big Time" Cheney wasn't a LITTLE more direct in calling out "Silky Pony" and worried his icy response was too subtle for the MSM & sleepy sheeple.
But then Lurch lumbers along and steps right in it ...
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