 By Michael Reagan September 11, 2003
Even though the new polls show that if McClintock got out it would enable Schwarzenegger to beat Cruz Bustamante, I doubt it. Look at it this way. The media is not conservative, especially here in California. The last thing they want is a Republican governor in Sacramento and they are going to do everything to prevent that from happening. As a result, they are going to go after the Republican candidate they view as the front runner. That's Arnold Schwarzenegger and they are already painting him as a racist, painting him as a womanizer and anti-Mexican. I think it's incumbent upon McClintock not to give in, not to drop out because if he did drop out and this unrelenting media attack on Schwarzenegger causes him to go into a free fall in the final days of the campaign, there will be no Republican left to pick up the pieces. This is not idle speculation. I recall what the media did to my friend Bruce Herschensohn when he ran against Barbara Boxer, and all the signs are there that they are getting ready to do the same to Schwarzenegger. If Matt Drudge is right in hinting darkly that there are all kinds of negative information about Schwarzenegger floating around out there, just waiting be aired in the media, we can expect a steady stream of excrement to be thrown at him as the campaign goes on. They're charging he's a racist, based on the comments of a couple of black body builders they dug up, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. This is the way the Democrats and their allies in the media play the game, doing what they call "candidate research" and then leaking the sleaze to their media friends. And it's beginning to work. According to the polls, instead of moving up in the polls, Schwarzenegger peaked at 25 percent and he's stalled there. Pretty soon I expect his percentage will begin to drop as more and more slime is dumped on him by the "impartial, non-partisan" media. Democrat campaigns are never about the issues. All the talk is about abortion. They don't want to talk about taxes or the economy or jobs or how to deal with the state's drowning in red ink. This campaign is not about who's pro-life or pro-choice, it's about economics, but by hammering on Schwarzenegger's pro choice position, the Democrats and the media hope to drive the majority of pro-life conservatives away from supporting him and staying home on election day. The Democrats don't want to talk about whether he can create jobs or fix the workman's compensation mess that has helped drive employers out of the state. They don't want to talk about those issues because they are the ones who created the whole rotten mess in Sacramento in the first place. So they go back to the old phony issues they always chatter about: racism. They play the race card to ruin his chances of winning the black and Latino vote. They charge that because he voted for proposition 187, that makes him anti-Mexican. But 60 percent of the state's voters, including a majority of Mexicans, voted for the measure. Does that imply that 60 percent of the voters, and a majority of Mexicans who voted for it, are anti-Mexican? Now they're making a big fuss about his quotes to Oui magazine years ago to suggest he's anti-woman. Pretty soon they'll have created the impression that Schwarzenegger is anti-every single group in the state, women, blacks, Mexicans - you name it. That's why McClintock has to stay in. If this sleaze campaign succeeds and drives Schwarzenegger down McClintock has to be there to pick up Humpty Dumpty's shattered pieces. He has to be the Republicans' ace in the hole.
 mereagan@hotmail.com Mike's column is distributed to subscribers for publication by: Cagle Cartoons, Inc.
|
||
