Word: begala
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...riveting minutes last Friday, CNN’s “Crossfire” dared to air a real debate, albeit by accident. “The Daily Show”’s Jon Stewart ambushed hosts Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala, charging them with “partisan hackery” and eviscerating them and the rest of the mainstream news media for abdicating their journalistic duties to the American public...
Today, however, the Begala-Carville strategy of branding Bush as a “radical” continues in the candidacy of current Democratic frontrunner Howard Dean. In a Sept. 23 speech in Copley Square—a speech replete with anti-Bush pejoratives but surprisingly light on evidence to substantiate claims that, for example, the President “doesn’t understand defense”—Dean attempted to cast the present administration as one completely out of touch with the values of voters: “What’s at stake in this...
...evidence of the “radical and dangerous” Bush agenda, Begala and Carville pointed to factually suspect examples such as “tax cuts for the rich;” in fact, middle-class working Americans received substantial tax relief under Bush’s new fiscal policies. They also accused Bush of “[handing] over Americans’ retirement benefits to the vagaries of the stock market,” however, Bush’s plan to rescue Social Security through limited privatization was dismissed outright, without analysis of stock market performance...
...Begala and Carville’s battle plan, to “call a radical a radical,” has not worked. Republicans swept midterm elections nationwide in Nov. 2002, prompting Washington Monthly editor-in-chief Paul Glastris to offer this clear explanation for why the Democrats got spanked: “They had no message.” Specifically, the Democrats’ mantra that “Bush is a radical,” supported with tired and trite examples, did not resonate with centrist voters. Glastris suggests that Democrats should have instead focused their campaigns...
...Begala-Carville battle plan did not work, precisely because voters recognized then, as they recognize now, that Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” is not radical. Certainly, tax cuts and limited privatization of Social Security are conservative practices, in that they reflect classical liberal values such as limited government and the primacy of individual decision-makers within the framework...