One of ash's favorite literary devices is what she calls "gentle sarcasm." In the following letter to her local daily, she addresses not merely what has already been summarized regarding the just-held 2006 mid-term election but what she anticipates will be said by the losing party in order to rationalize the outcome. But rather than spell it outright, she suggests a preemptive strike against attempting such nonsense, while referring to a previously written house editorial which had clearly intended to affect the results.
I see in our paper that it is post-mortem time. Or gloating time, depending on one’s political partiality.
Rove is no genius and, as it turns out, he never was. He picked a strategy – addressing the loyalists and ignoring everyone else – and stuck with it like the administration is stuck in Iraq. (Which makes you wonder: has Rove been dictating foreign policy all along? Maybe Rumsfeld was the wrong guy to fire.) The game plan worked until it didn’t. In spite of the signs – the stars all aligning in one bright spot in the sky – he focused on where it was starless. The populace screamed in unison: Karl, you can’t fool us forever, and neither will we passively endure attempts at intimidation, harassing phone calls, practically felonious ads, or untrustworthy machinery in a last-ditch effort to preserve your plummeting majority.
Copley’s own Ruben Navarrette – bless him – did his part with a column burying John Kerry – until he flip-flopped and praised him. For whatever impact it may have had, the State-Journal Register published it the day after the election which, considering the negative value of Kerry’s “flubbed” joke (and if you watch the tape, Kerry skipped those words when he looked up from his script to engage the audience), now seems rather appropriate.
But if the Saddam verdict didn’t rescue the Republicans, Kerry couldn’t either. All it means is Kerry, who was never going to be President, now REALLY won’t be. Neither will George Allen. When former New York Times polemicist William Safire drags himself out of retirement to write, Hey, the Democrats didn’t win either house by that much, he plays not only like the sourest grape, but an after-the-fact grape to boot.
Soon the post-election analysis will subside, replaced by convincing the citizenry that Republicanism was really not their friend.