October 18, 2004

The Lowest Blow

The memoir about the Kerry-Edwards campaign that will be the best seller will reveal the debate rehearsal aimed at focusing national attention on the fact that Vice President Cheney has a daughter who is a lesbian.

That this twice-delivered low blow was deliberate is indisputable. The first shot was taken by John Edwards, seizing a moderator's opening to smarmily compliment the Cheneys for loving their openly gay daughter, Mary. The vice president thanked him and yielded the remaining 80 seconds of his time; obviously it was not a diversion he was willing to prolong.
[Duh. VP Cheney made it pretty clear that it wasn't to be discussed or brought up again and she's his daughter!--Jen]

Until that moment, only political junkies knew that a member of the Cheney family serving on the campaign staff was homosexual. The vice president, to show it was no secret or anything his family was ashamed of, had referred to it briefly twice this year, but the press - respecting family privacy - had properly not made it a big deal. The percentage of voters aware of Mary Cheney's sexual orientation was tiny.

But Edwards's answer in the vice-presidential debate raised that percentage. Because Cheney refused to react and the media did not see the spotlight on lesbianism as part of a political plan, the opening shot worked.

Emboldened, members of Kerry's debate preparation team made Mary Cheney's private life the centerpiece of their answer to the question, especially worrisome to them, about same-sex marriage. Kerry was prepped to insert her sexuality into his rehearsed answer: "If you were to talk to Dick Cheney's daughter, who is a lesbian. ..."

But in this second time around, the gratuitous insertion of Cheney's daughter into an answer slipping around a hot-button social issue revealed that it was part of a deliberate Kerry campaign strategy.
[Ah, sKerry...refining the Clintons' Politics of Personal Destruction down to a new low!
I completely agree with Safire that it was deliberate on Kerry's part as it was about the most purposeful statement Kerry made all night!--Jen]

One purpose was to drive a wedge between the Republican running mates. President Bush supports a constitutional amendment limiting marriage to a union of a man and a woman; Cheney has long been on record favoring state option, but always adds that the president sets administration policy. That rare divergence of views is hardly embarrassing.
[I'm not so very sure that Bush and Cheney even diverge on this issue: President Bush made it clear that a Constitutional Amendment was necessary because Liberal judges who legislate from the bench were changing the decisions of the 50 states not to have same-sex marriage. In the cases of California and Louisiana, they've overruled state referendums banning same-sex marriage, directly contravening the will of the electorate. Cheney should note this publicly, too.--Jen]

The sleazier purpose of the Kerry-Edwards spotlight on Mary Cheney is to confuse and dismay Bush supporters who believe that same-sex marriage is wrong, to suggest that Bush is as "soft on same-sex" as Kerry is, and thereby to reduce a Bush core constituency's eagerness to go to the polls.

The pro-Kerry columnist Margaret Carlson put her finger on it, finding that Kerry and Edwards "realize that discussing Mary Cheney is a no-lose proposition: It highlights the hypocrisy of the Bush-Cheney position to Democrats while simultaneously alerting evangelicals to the fact that the Cheneys have an actual gay person in their household whom they apparently aren't trying to convert or cure."
[I think that the "hypocrisy" hit was the main point of Kerry's remark, but if the news that the Cheneys have a gay daughter shocks Conservative Christians out of voting for Bush, I'm sure the Dems wouldn't mind that either.]

After the outspoken Lynne Cheney blasted this unsought intrusion of her daughter's private life as "a cheap and tawdry trick," the Kerry campaign hustled forward John Edwards's wife to charge that such motherly outrage "indicates a certain degree of shame with respect to her daughter's sexual preferences."

Worse than insensitive, that shot was off message, peeling the veneer off the Kerry-Edwards justification for making Mary famous: their oleaginous claim that, gee, they were only complimenting Dick Cheney for his fatherly tolerance. The crusher to that pretense came when the Kerry campaign manager, Mary Beth Cahill, coolly announced that the Cheney daughter was "fair game."
[This revealed the Kerry campaign as beyond cruel and ruthless, but then that's what I've come to expect from them.
Speaking of shame, they are, as always, shameless!]

Apparently the American public thinks otherwise about the campaigning children of candidates. When polls showed two-to-one disapproval of the calculated Kerry-Edwards abuse of the young woman's privacy, the Democratic strategists who concocted this base-suppressing dirty trick orchestrated a defense that it was Dick Cheney who "outed" his daughter months ago. They are advising Kerry that he would look weak or, worse, slyly manipulative were he to apologize for tagging the Cheneys with the word "lesbian" before 50 million viewers.

Kerry will, I hope, assert his essential decency by apologizing with sincerity. Other Republicans hope he will let his self-inflicted wound fester. They have in mind a TV spot using an old film clip of a Boston lawyer named Welch at a Congressional hearing, saying "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"

William Safire and I are as one on this.
I, too, thought of the above query to Sen. McCarthy in the HUAC hearings in regards to the "outing" of Mary Cheney, which is more than ironic as the Dems are always accusing Right Wing Nuts like me of "McCarthyism."
Kerry's remark about Mary Cheney was OUTRAGEOUS--a complete invasion of her personal privacy!
Unless you are someone who wants to or is about to have sexual relations with Ms. Cheney, there is no reason to talk about her sexual preference and certainly no reason to discuss it--without her permission--on live TV in front of 40 million people!
Not all homosexuals are for "same-sex marriage;" in fact, I'm convinced that it's just the gay activists who are pushing for it.
It's my belief that homosexual citizens have pretty much the same civil rights as the rest of us and aren't being deprived of a thing right this minute, without any government stamp of approval on their "marriages."
That being said, Mary Cheney hasn't publicly endorsed same-sex marriage, to the best of my knowledge so why bring her up when the issue is under debate?
Ms. Cheney isn't running for office, either.
Her only "misfortune" is that she happens to be the Cheneys' daughter and for whatever reasons, is homosexual.
"Outing her" was a malicious, evil and purposefully hurtful thing for Kerry to say and if it costs him the election, good!
If Kerry could target Dick Cheney's daughter for her alternative lifestyle, which one of us will be the object of the next group hate for our PC crimes under a "President Kerry?"
I shudder to think.
As Lynn Cheney said about Kerry, "This is not a good man."
No, ma'am. He is not.
Buzz on the street is that Kerry's own sister Diana is a lesbian, also--Remember her?
I believe that this is the same one who tried to bring about a loss for John Howard in Australia by trash-talking Bush and Iraqi Coalition stalwarts like Howard.
That election didn't turn out too well for the Kerrys and God willing, this one won't either!
If Kerry really cared about the issue and putting a face on it, wouldn't he have kept it en famille?