In his acceptance speech last night, John Edwards accused the Republicans of taking this campaign “down the lowest possible road” and of practicing the “hateful, negative politics of the past.”
I couldn’t tell from the speech what specifically (if anything) he had in mind in making these accusations. But no matter. I’m sure many of the delegates in the audience are convinced that simply being a Republican is hateful.
So, let me paraphrase: “Hey, you hateful lowlifes! Come join us in building One America….”
This from a party that denied a platform to popular, progressive Governor Bob Casey of Pennsylvania in 1992 because he opposed abortion but honors Al Sharpton with a prime time speaking spot.
UPDATE [3 August 9:05PM]
Anyone interested in more information about how the Clinton Democrats treated Gov. Bob Casey should look at the 12th comment below — it’s a good example of how biased opinions lead to, er, misstated facts — and the comments quoted from Nat Hentoff that appear in my following reply.
I’m convinced that if the Democrats gain power that registering as a Republican will become a hate crime.
Two of this year’s democratic speakers are opposed to elective abortion. (I hate both pro-life and pro-choice as labels.)
How much do you want to bet that Republican Convention delegates are far more conservative than the US, or even most Republican officeholders? The GOP’s upcoming speaker, Jerry Falwell, is not one bit less repulsive than Al Sharpton.
I don’t like Falwell, but how many fatal race riots has he incited? How many race hoaxes has he perpetrated?
How many times did Al Sharpton blame 9/11 on American tolerance of abortion and homosexuality?
The late Michael Kelly said
Didn’t turn out that way, did it?
Andrew: Where did you get the idea that Jerry Falwell will be speaking at the Republican convention this year? The RNC has announced about 20 of the speakers who will appear at the convention, and neither Falwell nor Pat Robertson is among them.
–The GOP’s upcoming speaker, Jerry Falwell, is not one bit less repulsive than Al Sharpton–
He’s speaking, Andrew? Are you sure?
Falwell’s blaming 9/11 on American tolerance of abortion and homosexuality didn’t incite fatal race riots.
I seem to have fallen for the spoof version of the RNC schedule. The 1992 Convention featuring anti-Semitic rabble rouser Pat Buchanan must have given it enough plausibility. (The other, obvious parts of the spoof aren’t getting emailed around in the same way.) Who is giving the opening invocation? (That wouldn’t be a full speaker.)
Laura, I suggest you contemplate the connection between statements like Falwell’s and the assassinations of medical workers who provide elective abortions. Sharpton’s hands are not so much dirtier.
The primetime lineup for the GOP convention actually looks quite interesting. Will Schwarzenegger, Giuliani, McCain, and Pataki all safely stick to the themes of national security and lower taxes or will the divisions within the party over social issues be up for discussion? Is there anything on which Rick Santorum and Michael Bloomberg (who you’ll remember switched parties in order to avoid a crowded Democratic primary), both scheduled to speak, would find agreement?
Andrew-
I seem to have fallen for the spoof version of the RNC schedule.
Psst! You’re not going to be more endowed, either… :o)
I love what this says about allowing your preconceived notions to completely overwhelm any ability to think rationally, or even to make an attempt to verify obviously bogus information.
“Two of this year’s democratic speakers are opposed to elective abortion. (I hate both pro-life and pro-choice as labels.)” Really? Name them.
I suppose, though, that all the Democratic speakers are opposed to elective human chattel. (I hate both pro-freedom and pro-slavery as labels.)
“This from a party that denied a platform to popular, progressive Governor Bob Casey of Pennsylvania in 1992 because he opposed abortion but honors Al Sharpton with a prime time speaking spot. ”
I can’t imagine why they would deny a platform to the guy who refused to endorse the Clinton-Gore ticket. It must have to do with abortion.
actus – Your comment about Gov. Bob Casey at least shows that you are no more fair or accurate about Democrats than you are about “anti-affirmative action types.” I was only going to link the article by the civil libertarian and long-time Democrat Nat Hentoff from which the following comments are taken, but then I decided to quote the whole thing in case you chose not to follow the link. I wouldn’t expect someone who likes and admires Al Sharpton to like and admire Bob Casey, but at least you ought to get your facts straight about whether he supported Clinton/Gore in 1992 and 1996.
Life of the Party
By NAT HENTOFF, The New Republic, June 19, 2000
Robert Casey, who died on May 30 at age 68, was a Democrat fiercely committed to his party’s tradition of protecting society’s most vulnerable. And, for that, his party made him a pariah.
As governor of Pennsylvania from 1987 to 1994, Casey created model school-based child-care programs that offered infants and preschoolers–including poor children–full-day services and before- and after-school programs. That way, teenage parents could stay in school and poor adults could go to work knowing their children were safe. He lobbied unsuccessfully for universal health care in his state, but, failing that, as The New York Times reported in its May 31 obituary, “he did sign a bill providing health insurance for children whose families were too poor to pay for it but whose incomes were too high to be eligible for public assistance.” Before breast cancer became a political cliche, Casey invested $1 million in awareness and screening for the disease and required HMOs to pay for annual mammograms for women over 40. Harvard University pediatrician T. Berry Brazelton described Casey’s multidimensional health care programs for women and children as “a model for the rest of the country.”
The son of a coal-miner-turned-lawyer, Casey believed in the party of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and he doggedly rebuilt it in Pennsylvania. In 1991, he personally raised more than $1 million to help underdog Harris Wofford defeat Dick Thornburgh, then-President Bush’s former attorney general, for a United States Senate seat. At the time, Paul Begala, who worked for Casey and later for President Clinton, told Mary McGrory of The Washington Post: “Save for Bob Casey, Harris Wofford would have lost. Casey rebuilt the party from ashes, and made it a better organization than the Republicans’.”
Nonetheless, Casey’s party treated him with disdain. As the 1992 Democratic Convention in New York approached, Casey told me he expected, in light of his policy accomplishments and political loyalty, to be a speaker, maybe even the keynote speaker. But he wasn’t the keynote speaker. The honor of nominating Clinton went to New York Governor Mario Cuomo, who ignited the crowd by declaring, “Bill Clinton believes, as we all here do, in the first principle of our Democratic commitment: the politics of inclusion.”
Casey was not asked to speak. In fact, he and his Pennsylvania delegation were exiled to the farthest reaches of Madison Square Garden–because Casey was pro-life. It didn’t matter that, under his leadership, state contracts to minority- and women-owned firms had increased more than 1,500 percent in five years, or that he had appointed more female Cabinet members than any Democratic governor in the country, or that he had appointed the first black woman ever to sit on a state Supreme Court. Ron Brown, chief convention organizer and the Democratic Party’s symbol of minority inclusion, told Casey, “Your views are out of line with those of most Americans.”
Casey had the misfortune of being present during a great shift in the Democratic Party. A mere six years earlier, on September 26, 1986, then-Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas had assured the head of his state’s chapter of the National Right to Life Committee, “I am opposed to abortion and to government funding of abortion.” But, by the early ’90s, the Democrats, seeking the votes of upper-middle-class Republican women, were de-emphasizing economic protection and stressing cultural libertarianism. And, just to make sure everyone got the message, Democratic strategists invited Kathy Taylor, a pro-choice Pennsylvania Republican who had helped defeat Casey’s progressive tax reforms, to the New York convention. She appeared onstage pledging the National Abortion Rights Action League’s allegiance to the Clinton-Gore team. Then DNC officials sent Taylor, with a camera crew in tow, to find Casey in “Outer Mongolia,” as he put it, to further humiliate him. Tipped off, he declined the national exposure. Shortly before Casey left the convention, Al Gore called him to apologize for any embarrassment. The governor told me dryly that he doubted Gore was speaking from the heart.
“What has become of the Democratic Party I once knew?” Casey asked when he returned home. But he didn’t leave the party, even though, in his view, “it ha[d] become a wholly owned subsidiary of the National Abortion Rights Action League.” The GOP would have been delighted to gather him in, but Casey said, “The pro-life Republicans drop the children at birth and do nothing for them after that.” He added, in an interview with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette not long before he left office in 1994, that “as far as the Republican Party is concerned, the business of government is business.” Casey’s politics were simple, but they were so heretical that in the language of ’90s American politics they quite literally didn’t have a name. And so last week, in a final slap, the Washington Post, New York Times, and CNN obituaries identified the former governor as a “conservative Democrat.”
James Carville worked on Casey’s 1986 and 1990 reelection campaigns. In a June 1 interview with National Review Online, Carville said of his former boss: “You have no idea what a deep sense of probity he had…. He was just the kind of person that made the whole Washington establishment completely uncomfortable…. They could never understand him.” Carville also called his former partner, Begala, was also “a Casey prot