AN AMAZING THEORY OF WHY ED GILLESPIE’S “CAMPAIGN” MISSED NORTHAM’S BLACKFACE/KKK PICTURES:
During the 1992 campaign, I was a military aide to an assistant secretary in one of the cabinet departments and all of my counterparts were Bush Schedule C appointees. Through them, I became acquainted with some senior people on the Bush campaign team. There was tons of oppo on Bill Clinton and his horndogging and the fights between Bill and Hillary on the campaign trail and some really salacious stuff on Hillary’s extra-curricular activities but the Bush campaign elected not to use it in large part because Bush was still stinging from the Willie Horton ad. So finding a GOP campaign acting against its own interests for the sake of being a noble loser isn’t new. I would submit the 2008 McCain campaign had as its objective to be a gracious loser to the first viable black presidential candidate. I’ve never really been convinced Mitt Romney wanted anything more than to lose cleanly in 2012.
As to the denials, if you’d had the images and chosen not to use them because you wanted to take the high road and protect “muh principles,” knowing what you know today, would you admit to not using them? My guess is that you would deny knowing anything about them and take the hit for being merely incompetent.
“Democrats sure got it good,” John Nolte likes to say. If you’re on the left, you can tell then-President Obama to “Go for the throat,” and then pose afterwards as an objective Sunday morning talk show moderator. If you’re on the left, you can say the most racist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic statements imaginable, and wind up with a sweet gig at NBC. Your “spiritual advisors” can utter racist statements, which are first praised as solemn truths and then airbrushed away when they become inconvenient gaffes.
As Glenn has written, Trump is “a symptom of how rottenly dysfunctional our sorry political class is. Take away Trump and they’re just as awful and destructive. He just brings their awfulness to the fore, where it’s no longer ignorable. Now they’re willing to play with fire, risking the future of the polity over little more than hurt feelings, in a way that would have been unthinkable not long ago.” He’s “not the cause of Washington’s decline. He’s a symptom, the wrecking ball that many Americans think was required.”