...a prank legendarily pulled at my high school in which students procured
well fewer than 20 live chickens, numbered them 1 through 20 with magic markers (leaving some numbers out), set them loose, and then sat back and gleefully
watched as hapless school officials ran around the school searching for the
remaining missing chickens that had never actually existed.
Nobody knows how many former supporters of Senator Clinton are going to swallow all their principles to vote for McCain but I'm willing to bet that the numbers are smaller than the number of Huckamaniacs who'll be staying home in November. If you're telling the Fred Thompson voters that McCain is safe for Democrats, what incentives are you giving them to come out.
McCain needs to hammer this one hard this week because it'll be a non-issue by Saturday given the vagaries of the news cycle. He should also wonder how much schadenfreude he can enjoy on this one. I'm betting his geniuses have misread their message again.
As an aside, have you seen this ad? "I admire his maverick and independent streak." That's not even a sentence, is it? At least, it's not a sentence in which the adjectives match.
3 comments:
I think you're wrong here, Grumps. She was a Dem activist for years, but finally decided her principles didn't allow her to support a Dem candidate. It's her principles that made her do what she did - not ignoring her principles.
And while that sentence is awkward, I think you can either make "maverick and independent" into an adjectival clause (I may be making that phrase up), or just assume "maverick" is another adjective modifying the object "streak."
Not how I'd have written it, but then, if I were writing the Republican commercials, McCain would be up by 15 points by now, and what fun would that be?
I guess it all comes down to which issues made her switch.
It couldn't have been healthcare and it couldn't have been reproducive rights and it couldn't have been the war because McCain and Senator Clinton disagree on all of those.
It's hard to see any parallels between Mccain and Clinton that are bright enough to draw a single supporter. The only driver that I can see is animus toward Senator Obama for having had the temerity to stall the inevitable. Maybe that's the parallel. Both McCain and Senator Clinton considered it their right to be nominated, each "The One" for their own party and Ms B is cranky about that.
Whatever the reason, she now scores herself as an Independent rather than a Democrat. I think we'd most all want to be thought to be a maverick and independent and that may soothe her compunctions.
The ultimate point is that, despite the PUMA's bravado, there just aren't that many of them and certainly not enough to offset the damage done by pandering to crossovers by McCain.
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Yeah, it's clunky construction but maybe not utterly irredeemable. If "maverick" modifies "streak" then "independent" is just puff. It's just one more example of McCain's message not feeling quite polished, as if his candidacy was being run through the spellchecker but never proofread.
To be honest, I have to wonder why she ever considered herself to be a Democrat in the first place, because if she's so willing to shift allegiances at the drop of a hat, she certainly couldn't have been that committed to the ideals the Democratic Party supports.
This situation works out well for all involved. Bartoshevich gets to milk her 15 minutes of fame for all it's worth, and the McCain campaign gets to milk the idea that there's scads of disgruntled former Hillary supporters out there - but I'm willing to bet the numbers aren't as large as some would like to believe.
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