Ask Auntie Pinko
July 18, 2002

Dear Auntie Pinko,

If the 2004 Presidential election were held tomorrow, which Democrat do you think has the best possibility of beating Bush... and why?

Kathy,
Norfolk, VA

Dear Kathy,

Auntie Pinko is going to avoid answering your question. It should be fairly clear from the many questions I have answered here for the nice folks at Democratic Underground that Auntie Pinko is a progressive liberal who is most likely to enthusiastically support candidates who campaign on platforms of economic and social justice. As to whether such candidates, or any other type of candidates, offer the best possibility of beating Mr. Bush in the campaign of '04, I am reluctant to speculate, and here is why:

You may or may not be aware that a man named Mr. G. Gordon Liddy is currently being sued by a woman named Ms Ida Wells, regarding allegations that Mr. Liddy, a talk radio host, made on the air. In these allegations, Mr. Liddy asserted that the historical incident known as "Watergate" was an attempt by Republicans to find and destroy material that the Democrats might use against them in the 1972 campaign. The material in question was supposedly pictures linking Mr. John Dean's girlfriend with a call-girl ring run by Ms Wells, (at that time a secretary at the Democratic National Committee.)

This little essay into historical revisionism would be ludicrous if it weren't an illustration of how short the American public's memory really is. The essence of Watergate was not the break-in at DNC headquarters. The monumental disgrace that the bungled break-in exposed was not about GOP attempts to counter possible Democratic sleaze, it was about a systematic policy and a well-planned, well-financed campaign of action on the part of the GOP to subvert the electoral process by targeting any prominent Democratic candidate who looked like they might pose a threat to the GOP's goal of re-electing Mr. Nixon.

It began long before a bunch of bungling CIA-trained burglars taped open a door at the Watergate complex. It began with the process gleefully known as "ratfucking," in which GOP operatives methodically collected (or manufactured, when there was nothing to collect) potentially compromising material on Democrats and used a system of "black bag" operations to plant it, leak it, and hype it in ways that destroyed the political credibility of viable Democratic candidates. And it was not a "rogue" operation pursued by a few maverick, over-enthusiastic Party loyalists, but a meticulously honed policy that reached to the Party's highest levels.

During the first ten or fifteen years after Watergate, the GOP was obliged, based on the public outrage generated by the brazen sleaze and illegality, to moderate their use of these procedures. But Auntie Pinko doesn't believe for one minute that the GOP has given up "ratfucking" or other unsavory tactics that can be applied in desperation to cover a morally and politically bankrupt agenda and a clear record of exploiting the poorest citizens to benefit the richest. And given the current conditions and the public's short memory, I think the time is ripe for a resurgence of this kind of shenanigans by the GOP.

While there are any number of good, honest, thoughtful people in the Republican Party, who sincerely abjure the use of such destructive methods, the Party's leadership has a long history of letting the ends of power justify the most repulsive of means. As long as money can buy elections, the Democrats, historically less well-financed and more reluctant to apply such devices and therefore more vulnerable to them, will have to be very careful about protecting themselves.

Auntie Pinko assumes that by the time a Democratic leader actually declares her/his candidacy for an office, s/he will have considered this vulnerability and taken steps to minimize the ways illegal action can be taken to damage her/his electability. Until they make that declaration, however, I won't do anything to help train the sights of GOP dirty tricksters on any Democrat. But thank you for asking Auntie Pinko's opinion!

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