Campaign Notes Part II

Campaign Notes Part II

John LeBoutillier
Tuesday, July 13, 2004

1. The idea of postponing this fall’s election is totally absurd. As a Republican conservative, I am embarrassed to have such an idea surface from a GOP Administration. Just imagine the outrage on the Right if this idea had come out of the Clinton Administration in 2000 - just months before he was due to leave office. We would be screaming - many were anyway - that “Clinton has a plan to stay in office!”

We, the people, run this country. To let some terrorist - or some inside-the-beltway, un-elected bureaucrat - determine whether an election is to be held or not is a total disgrace.

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Let us hope this inane idea has been shelved - permanently.

2. The Senate Intelligence Committee Report on WMD and Iraq is yet another sign of something written in this space long ago: Bush’s Achilles Heel would be this cancerous intelligence ‘tumor’ that has become a government within the government.

It is so true. Who is really running our government? We went to war over weapons that did not exist. Yet the President, the CIA Director - even the Secretary of State - told us these weapons did exist. Now they all just want to blame the CIA. How about “the buck stops here”?

When you go to a doctor for surgery - say, a brain operation - and the surgeon operates on the wrong side of the brain (as happened several years ago at New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital) - the surgeon will try to lay it off on a technician “who placed the X-ray backwards on the screen.” But the doctor is in charge; it is his ultimate responsibility.

In the case of Iraq, President Bush was obsessed with Iraq from Day One. He has indeed removed Saddam - and that part of it is a plus. The key question is can Iraq be “put back together” into a unified nation or will it descend into civil war and chaos.

And how long do American troops have to stay there?

3. Team Bush is quietly exploring the possibility of removing Vice President Dick Cheney from the ticket. But they won’t end up doing it. It’s too messy, too ‘panicky,’ and there is no natural replacement that makes the GOP ticket automatically stronger.

Prediction: Cheney will be a net ‘negative’ for the Republican ticket in this race. He is a lightening rod without offsetting that with assets that help the ticket.

4. Edwards will be a thorn in the side of Hillary Clinton for the rest of her career. As a young, very ambitious, attractive southern man, he will bedevil her in her attempt to be nominated for President down the line. Let us examine a few scenarios:

The Kerry-Edwards ticket wins. They will then be re-nominated in 2008. That means Hillary can’t run until 2012 - and she will then have Edwards also running. Edwards will have seized control of the party machinery and built up chits all over the country.

Kerry-Edwards lose this November. You can bet John Edwards will ‘go for it’ in 2008 and it will be an all-out war between him and Hillary for the Democratic nomination. In this scenario, she has to move even farther ‘left’ to get the nomination, thus making it harder to win in November.

Kerry-Edwards wins and then along the way something happens to Kerry and Edwards becomes President. (Keep in mind that one out of three Vice Presidents becomes President.) Edwards will control the Democratic Party. You can bet he will want to remove the threat of the Clintons running the Democratic Party in any way.

In fact, Kerry, too, will use the Clintons for their fund-raising abilities, but he will keep as far away from them as possible. If he wins, Kerry will not allow the Clintons to ‘infect’ his administration.

5. There will not be a terrorist attack inside the United States before the election. We have tuned up all our security forces. Look for a big attack on US forces or interests some where else.