[Mb-civic] Turncoats You Can Count On LATimes

[Michael Butler]

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-carlson14oct14.story

MARGARET CARLSON

Turncoats You Can Count On

We're always ready to believe political defectors.
 MARGARET CARLSON

 October 14, 2004

 I assumed that anyone who hunches over like President Bush would have a
bulge in his jacket. So I dismissed the story of a concealed radio device
during the first presidential debate as either a wardrobe malfunction or a
left-wing conspiracy. But then, when the story was picked up by Rupert
Murdoch's New York Post, I suddenly found myself looking up the number of
Bush's tailor, Georges de Paris. I admit it: I gave the story more credit
when it came from the right-wing Post than when I first saw it on the
liberal website salon.com.

 By the same token, when I thought Bush had done a poor job in that same
debate, I wasn't sure of my instincts until former GOP
congressman-turned-talk-show-host Joe Scarborough said so on MSNBC. If a
fellow Republican said it, it must be true.

 Assertions gain credibility when they come from the opposite side of the
aisle. Candidates know it too. That's why, during the second debate, when
Bush wanted to add believability to an economic assertion, he didn't cite
his own secretary of the Treasury, he cited President Clinton's ‹ Robert
Rubin. John Kerry, when he's criticizing the war, cites L. Paul Bremer and
Donald Rumsfeld. In this campaign, the most powerful ads are the ones by
filmmaker Errol Morris in which Republicans look straight into the camera
and say why they are not going to vote for the president again.

 There's nothing new about this phenomenon. We all know that it's hard to
leave the warm bosom of your own side, and therefore those who do it tend to
be given the benefit of the doubt. But in this election it's reached a new
peak; it's become an apostate's ball: You are much more likely to get
noticed if you are Nixon going to China. Would the otherwise unremarkable
Georgia Democratic Sen. Zell Miller have gotten a prime-time spot at the
Republican convention to rant that Kerry wanted to defend the U.S. with
spitballs if he weren't ostensibly a fellow Democrat? Would Ron Reagan have
had a cameo at the Democratic convention if his name were Ron Mondale?

 Anyone who wades into the debate is hyperlinked to his political past. Take
the salt-of-the-earth, 86-year-old onetime secretary at the Air National
Guard unit in Texas in which Lt. George W. Bush served. She said she'd typed
memos (not the CBS ones) from Lt. Col. Jerry Killian criticizing Bush's
absence from flight duty. But when she was identified in a New York Times
story as an Al Gore voter, I wondered how many readers would bother to
believe her. On the other hand, if she'd been a lifelong Republican, no one
would have doubted her for a second.

 The only way to detract from a political cross-dresser is to point out that
crossing over can be advantageous. It can juice a flagging career (that's
what happened to new Bush cheerleader Ron Silver) or help change a family
dynamic (Stephen Baldwin was overshadowed by libs Alec and Billy until he
was born again as a Christian and Republican on cable TV).

 Nothing helps a Democrat in trouble like a Republican, and vice versa. The
most damaging accusation of the campaign ‹ that Kerry wasn't brave enough to
earn his medals despite Navy records and the testimony of veterans who
actually served on his boat ‹ was first undercut by the revelation that the
author of "Unfit for Command," John O'Neill, had been handpicked by Richard
Nixon's Charles Colson to stalk Kerry in the 1970s; in other words, he was a
GOP hack. O'Neill's credibility was then partly revived by his
(self-serving) revelation that he was a Gore voter in 2000.

 At that point, what Kerry needed was a Republican. He could've tried Jim
Rasmussen again (the guy who appeared out of the blue during the Iowa
primary to tell how Kerry saved him from drowning in the Mekong Delta), but
these things usually work only once.

 The person Kerry really wanted to defend him (despite the eloquence of
former Democratic Sen. Bob Kerrey) was Republican Sen. John McCain. But
McCain, whose daily commute is across the aisle, punted. He gave only a
halfhearted defense to Kerry, but that was it ‹ and he earned a big,
well-photographed hug from Bush in return. Aides say McCain worked behind
the scenes to get Bush to denounce the ads against a fellow sailor, but
failed. Behind the scenes doesn't count. You have to go against your team in
public. 

 It's too late for surrogates now. That's why each candidate needs to be on
the lookout for that part of himself that sees some truth in the other side.


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