Monday, October 06, 2008

Into the dirt ...

Once when I was a kid I noticed a large flock of birds resting on the power lines outside our house. My mother told me that a cold front must be arriving and the birds were gathering to head south. A similar phenomenon takes place in the mid-west where we lived for a time, when the sky suddenly darkens and wind goes eerily still just before a huge storm arrives.

In America today you can sense the winds changing. William Kristol, in his column today in the New York Times, signaled the arrival of the dirty winds of the Republican Presidential campaign. It is a wind we have seen before, once swirled and stirred by the likes of Lee Atwater (who long ago offered to pay a mutual friend of ours to spy on me when I was a lowly operative in a failed campaign to unseat Strom Thurmond) and later by his protégé Karl Rove. Obama can see it coming, everyone knows it’s coming. McCain has little choice anymore, having struck his deal with the devil to win this race at any cost.

Gone are the lofty pronouncements of running a clean campaign on the issues. That became undeniably clear with the choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate – a person who is nothing but a Hail Mary pass for votes. It strains the imagination that McCain can possibly believe she is capable of running the country at the hour it faces it’s greatest challenges since the eve of World War Two.

So all bets are off and its down into the dirt we go.

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