Fifty years ago today, Richard Nixon resigned from the presidency. The Watergate scandal had left him with no choice. He was facing an almost certain House impeachment and Senate conviction. Even his closest allies turned on him. When you lose Barry Goldwater, you know it's over.
But that was a different era; an era when both parties - Democrat and Republican - knew the truth and weren't afraid to speak it. Does anybody have any doubt that if Nixon were president today, his party would bend over backwards to thwart any attempt to remove him from office? Imagine a scenario where Fox News and Newsmax were able to redefine the scandal from Nixon breaking the law to him being the victim of malicious lies by RINOs who were jealous of his greatness and wanted him out. Not only would he not have resigned, those Republicans who had called for him to do so would have faced a primary challenge where they likely would've been defeated.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to today's GOP, a party that has lost whatever moral compass it once had, and now has become nothing more than a zero sum, mud-throwing operation that will stop at nothing to win, even if it means lying and cheating to do so.
Throughout most of the summer of 2004, John Kerry was ahead of George Bush in the polls. By the end of the Democratic National Convention, he led Bush by two and a half points nationally: 47.5 to 45 percent. Then on August 5, a group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth (SBVT) began running one-minute ads questioning Kerry's service record. The ads were blatantly dishonest, and John McCain, to his credit, condemned them.
However, by the end of August, they had done so much damage, that he went from leading by 2.5 points to trailing by 2.5 points. Indeed, Bush's lead would swell to six points in September, and he wound up being only the second Republican since Ronald Reagan to win both the electoral college and the popular vote. The other was his father, who, not coincidentally, also used deliberately misleading ads to defeat his opponent, Michael Dukakis, in 1988. Like father like son, the saying goes.
Fast forward twenty years. Kamala Harris and her running mate Tim Walz are ahead of Donal Trump and JD Vance by 2 points nationally in 538. They also hold slim leads in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, and are within a point in Arizona, Georgia and Nevada. The Democratic convention is ten days away in Chicago, but Team Trump isn't waiting that long to start its smear campaign.
Apparently, someone high up in the food chain must've informed them that going after Harris's race and ethnicity isn't a very effective strategy, so they've opted for Plan B: Walz's service record. Their main bone of contention is that Walz put in for his retirement simply to get out of being deployed to Iraq and / or Afghanistan.
Forget for a moment the sheer audacity of a campaign whose leader used "bone spurs" as an excuse to get out of going to Vietnam, to impugn the reputation of someone who actually served 24 years in the Army National Guard. If it wasn't so despicable, it would be hysterical. And yet despicable is exactly what it is, and if the Harris campaign knows what's good for them, they would be well advised to not make the same mistake Kerry did by assuming voters will be smart enough to figure it out.
The sad truth about the American electorate is that they're not too sophisticated when it comes to nuanced issues like this. Like the mob in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, they can be easily manipulated. Right now, Walz is pretty much a blank slate. A good chunk of the country doesn't know that much about him. That's both good and bad. It's good because he doesn't come with the usual baggage most politicians come with; it's bad because it allows opponents to define him pretty much as they want to.
Now Walz does have a couple of things going for him that Kerry didn't. 1. He's has a much more likable and outgoing personality, which makes him far more appealing to voters; and 2. He isn't at the top of the ticket, Harris is. But in an election that most predict will be VERY close, any negative attack has the potential to gain traction and prove decisive. The architect of the Swift Boat attack ads, Chris LaCivita, just happens to be the co-manager of the Trump campaign.
And that is why it is incumbent upon the DNC and Harris to get out in front of these attacks now before they start sticking. Trump may be the laziest and most undisciplined candidate in American politics, as evidenced by his recent dumpster fire of a press conference at Mar-a-Lago, but his one super power has always been his ability to drag opponents down to his level. Before he was done with Hillary Clinton, he managed to convince nearly half of the electorate that she was Ma Barker. Trust me, Trump and his cohorts will do everything in their power to convince the country that Walz is the second coming of Benedict Arnold.
You might ask why would Trump need to resort to such tactics? After all, according to all the pollsters, the economy and the border continue to be the top two issues for voters. Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report believes that if Trump just sticks to the issues, he should win.
There's just one problem with that reasoning. If Walter is correct in her assessment, Trump, even with all his flaws, would be ahead in the polls. Instead he's trailing; worse, the trends don't look particularly promising for him. Arizona, Georgia and Nevada have just been moved from lean Republican to tossup, meaning it's entirely possible that even with the top two issues going against her, Harris could pull off a repeat of what Joe Biden accomplished in 2020.
The fact is for most voters the economy is already baked into the equation. Those who think it sucks are likely voting for Trump; those who think it's ok or could be better are likely voting for Harris. If the recent polling is accurate, roughly 5-7 percent of the electorate haven't decided who they're voting for. If the economy hasn't pushed them over into Trump's column, it isn't likely to in the next three months, unless, of course, we fall into a recession or worse. And most economists don't believe that's going to happen. As for the border, killing the bi-partisan Senate bill the way he did is more likely to hurt him than help him with undecideds.
That leaves Trump with the only weapon left at his disposal: the smear campaign. If he can drag Harris and Walz down to his level, he could eke out a narrow win in the electoral college. Remember, he lost the popular vote to Clinton in '16, yet won Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin by a mere 78,000 votes. He actually only needs one of those three states to capture the presidency, assuming he carries the Sun Belt.
With the wind at their backs, Democrats can ill afford to take their foot off the pedal. To use a football analogy, they were trailing by two touchdowns at halftime when they decided to change quarterbacks. They then erased that deficit in the third quarter and are now poised to take a three point lead into the fourth.
I've seen enough football games to know that a three-point lead is nothing. All it takes is a costly turnover and the next thing you know, your opponent is at your goal line looking to score the winning touchdown. It may well be that Trump continues to implode; clearly he's off his game. Or it could be that the attacks against Walz break through.
In the end, the team that is better prepared for any eventually usually prevails.
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