I’m old enough to remember when Democrats could smile as they described their opponents as extreme right-wingers. It’s time to return to those days—tonight.
Bush, on the advice of Newt Gingrich, has changed tactics, the Post reports. No longer is he describing Kerry as a flip-flopper. Instead, Bush last week called Kerry a “liberal,” and even once mispronounced his very name, calling him “Kennedy.” And of course tonight we will hear “tax and spend.”
What’s the counternotion? Simply that Bush is an extremist. Kerry needs to remind Americans that in 2000, Bush disguised himself as a compassionate conservative, but in office he turned out to be a plain old right-winger. Kerry, as Harold Meyerson points out in the Post op-ed pages today, is not exactly a flaming liberal; at best, he is Clintonian, having voted for welfare reform and a balanced budget (back in the days when the Republicans wanted to balance it). Why is it so hard for Kerry, ever-desperate to appeal to moderate swing voters, to paint Bush as the extremist that he is?
Bush’s Medicare drug plan is so hated that the president didn’t even dare show up at the AARP convention in Las Vegas, even though Bush was there at the same time. Bush’s plans for privatizing Social Security are right out of the extremists’ handbook. His tax cuts are so extreme that they’ve destroyed any ability to create intelligently designed social programs for a decade. And his views on social issues, such as abortion, gays, prayer in school and faith-based everything could have been written by Pat Robertson. Not to mention Bush’s gun policies. And so on.
This is what used to be called the extreme right. That Bush has tried to mainstream it doesn’t make it any less extreme. Is it so hard for Kerry to say: “My friends, the president says that he is a conservative. Well I know conservatives. Conservatives—like Dick Lugar and Bob Dole—are friends of mine. And Mr. Bush: You are no conservative. You are further to the right than Barry Goldwater, who would be shocked at some of your extreme positions. So would Eisenhower, and even Dick Nixon. We can’t afford four more years with an extreme right-wing president.”
P.S. John, don’t forget to keep saying: We could afford this or that, if we weren’t spending hundreds of billions of dollars in a mistaken war.
