Senator Obama e-mailed an excerpt of his book
The Audacity of Hope, due out in October, to supporters today. It's obvious the book will be an examination of dirty politics and the partisan techniques that have been widly popular with the Bush administration.
The excerpt did not make any earth-shattering comments of course, however Kerry was mentioned a couple times already. Given the tone of the excerpt, I expect when the whole book comes out in October, it will provide a favorable account of Kerry in the 2004 election. Here's hoping! I'd hate for a joust between my two favorite politicians.
No wonder then that upon my arrival in Washington that January, I felt like the rookie who shows up after the game, his uniform spotless, eager to play, even as his mudsplattered teammates tend to their wounds. While I had been busy with interviews and photo shoots, full of highminded ideas about the need for less partisanship and acrimony,Democrats had been beaten across the board—the presidency, Senate seats, House seats. My new Democratic colleagues could not have been more welcoming toward me;one of our few bright spots, they would call my victory. In the corridors, though, or during a lull in the action on the floor, they’d pull me aside and remind me of what typical Senate campaigns had come to look like.
They told me about their fallen leader, Tom Daschle of South Dakota, who had seen $21 million worth of negative ads rain down on his head—full-page newspaper ads and television spots informing his neighbors day after day that he supported baby-killing and men in wedding gowns, a few even suggesting that he’d treated his first wife badly,despite the fact that she had traveled to South Dakota to help him get reelected. They recalled Max Cleland, the former Georgia incumbent, a triple-amputee war veteran who had lost his seat in the previous cycle after being accused of insufficient patriotism, of aiding and abetting Osama bin Laden.
And then there was the small matter of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth: the shocking efficiency with which a few well-placed ads and the chants of conservative media could transform a decorated Vietnam warhero into a weakkneed appeaser.
That same week, I happened to run into retiring Senator Zell Miller, the lean, sharp-eyed Georgia Democrat and NRA Board member who had gone sour on the Democratic Party, endorsed George Bush, and delivered the blistering keynote address at the Republican National Convention—a no-holds-barred rant against the perfidy of John Kerry and his supposed weakness on national security.
Ours was a brief exchange, filled with unspoken irony—the elderly southerner on his way out, the young black northerner on his way in, the contrast that the press had noted in our respective convention speeches. Senator Miller was very gracious and wished me luck with my new job. Later, he would be quoted in the newspapers calling my speech at the Convention one of the best he’d ever heard, before noting—with what I imagined to be a sly smile—that it may not have been the most effective speech in terms of helping to win an election.
In other words: My guy had lost. Zell Miller’s guy won. That was the hard, cold political reality. Everything else was just sentiment.
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