Value Judgment: Rolling the Novak boulder up the hill again

Value Judgment is a daily weblog written by two independent voters on the eastern seaboard of the United States. VJ will focus on the 2004 U.S. Presidential campaigns, including strategy, tactics, and substance. The authors supported Howard Dean in the Democratic primary. Accordingly, his activities will be a prominent topic on this site.

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March 15, 2004

Rolling the Novak boulder up the hill again

Robert Novak serves his masters well today, spinning Senator McCain's hours-long flirtation with being Kerry's running mate as unjustified and horribly disloyal to the President, "[giving] aid and comfort to the political enemy" ("McCain as Hair Shirt", Washington Post, 03/15/2004). The glaring assumption he leaves out of his screed is that Bush has governed as a good Republican and deserves his party's loyalty.

Hey Bob, maybe McCain is the one being a patriot by showing more loyalty to his country than his overreaching, poorly governing party. Ever think of that?

Oddly, Novak does not appear in WaPo's list of columnists, but I saw his column in the print edition. Maybe they're 'disappearing' him from their website in preparation for dropping him from the print page for his own history of 'giving aid' to enemies of the US by exposing undercover CIA operatives? Nah, probably not.

And townhall.com (where Novak's columns also appear) is on the fritz today, redirecting me to www.asianstudies.org, then a page on www.heritage.org, then back again in an infinite loop. Denial of Service attack or incompetent web team? You decide.

So, I can't easily link to the column. Oh well. No loss.

Posted by V at March 15, 2004 07:23 AM

Comments

Well... all I'm gonna say here is that Senator McCain has demonstrated yet again why he remains beloved by many Independents, myself included.

My dream team: McCain/Dean in either order.

Posted by: Kevin@TIV at March 16, 2004 01:20 PM

Okay, so I lied... I'm gonna say more.

The fact that Novak got all hot and bothered by McCain's obvious joke says a lot about how insecure GOP partisans are about Bush's re-election chances.

For his part, I think that McCain made the joke in part to send a clear signal to Rove/Cheney that he is supporting Bush for his own reasons and that they shouldn't get complacent about thinking that he (McCain) is in any way marching to their orders. Rove and Cheney don't dare risk personally remonstrating him for the Kerry joke. They understand that he remains far more popular with swing voters, particularly Independents, than Bush is and that Bush is probably gonna need to rid McCain's Indy coat-tails in November. So, as usual, they had Novak do the deed and, like a good lapdog, he did.

Personally, I don't think McCain's popularity with Indies will do Bush much good in November. I've searched several times and have only found one single pro-Bush "Independent" site. And in reality all it is is a single page, devoid of content, tacked onto an overtly partisan GOP site. On the other hand there are still a number of Indy pro-Dean sites and blogs, at least one pro-Kerry Indy site as well as the Indy pro-Clark blog that The Centrist Coalition was hosting - all of which have content and reader interaction via message boards and blogs.

Posted by: Kevin@TIV at March 16, 2004 04:00 PM