Ed Driscoll

By Ed Driscoll

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That’s the title of Michelle Malkin’s latest op-ed:

Coakley enjoys statewide popularity because of her successes as attorney general and Middlesex district attorney. By at least one measure, her strategy is working: A Globe poll published Sunday showed her leading her Republican rival, state Senator Scott Brown, by 15 percentage points.

For many Democrats, that is too close for comfort, in a race for the seat held for so long by a Kennedy in one of the bluest states in the land. Other polls have showed the race much tighter.

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Despite that, there is a subdued, almost dispassionate quality to her public appearances, which are surprisingly few. Her voice is not hoarse from late-night rallies. Even yesterday, the day after a hard-hitting debate, she had no public campaign appearances in the state.

Coakley bristles at the suggestion that, with so little time left, in an election with such high stakes, she is being too passive.

“As opposed to standing outside Fenway Park? In the cold? Shaking hands?’’ she fires back, in an apparent reference to a Brown online video of him doing just that.

It also dovetails remarkably well with this excerpt in New York magazine from John Heilemann and Mark Halperin’s Game Change:

No one in the Edwardses’ political circle felt anything less than complete sympathy for Elizabeth’s plight. And yet the romance between her and the electorate struck them as ironic nonetheless—because their own relationships with her were so unpleasant that they felt like battered spouses. The nearly universal assessment among them was that there was no one on the national stage for whom the disparity between public image and private reality was vaster or more disturbing.

With her husband, she could be intensely affectionate or brutally dismissive. At times subtly, at times blatantly, she was forever letting John know that she regarded him as her intellectual inferior. She called her spouse a “hick” in front of other people and derided his parents as rednecks. One time, when a friend asked if John had read a certain book, Elizabeth burst out laughing. “Oh, he doesn’t read books,” she said. “I’m the one who reads books.”

At the Corner, Jonah Goldberg quotes the Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne, and files it in the “Liberalism is Never Wrong Dept.”

I love this from E. J. Dionne today:

If you held a contest to pick the worst thing a politician could be called at this moment, my nominee would be Wall Street Liberal.

That label has everything. I personally despise the way the noble liberal idea has been devalued, but face it: Conservatives have had great success in discrediting liberalism, to the point that most liberals dare not call themselves by their own name.

If you pay attention, this is an almost universal sentiment among liberal writers like Dionne. Liberals didn’t do anything to discredit liberalism, conservatives did! And just to be clear, Dionne doesn’t mean conservatives discredited liberalism by pointing out its very real flaws and mistakes. No, no. Conservatives have made liberalism into a dirty word, unfairly, by deploying evil hitmen like Lee Atwater and Karl Rove.

It couldn’t possibly have anything to do with the fact that liberals did the damage themselves, because liberalism is never wrong.

Liberalism’s inherent salt-of-the-earth modesty is what keeps it so sane and grounded in reality.

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1 Comments, 1 Threads

  1. 1. Bohemond

    On liberalism:

    Dionne of course may mean exactly what you say he does. But the discrediting of the word “liberal” relates to how it was hijacked by the Left; how the name for the noble philosophy of J S Mill, the sense in which many Europeans and the Australian Liberal Party still use the word, in the United States somehow became instead a euphemism for Democratic Socialism. We have had to coin “libertarian” to recapture approximately what “liberal” once meant.