No More Mr. And Ms. Nice Guy!

Some in the Liberal Blogosphere are very concerned that Democrats are saying too many nice things about Sen. John McCain, and they are taking them to task for it! The Carpetbagger Report, a liberal blog, is laying down new rules for the Dem candidates!. Here is part of their post below:

OK, new rule for Democratic presidential campaigns: unhelpful praise for John McCain should, from now on, be off limits. Sure, the candidates may get along well with McCain, and McCain may be a nice guy to hang out with, but this is a partisan exercise and a zero-sum game.

As much as I love the Big Dog, there’s just no reason to make things easier on McCain with comments like these.

At a stop in rural Pennsylvania, over winding roads and through rolling hills in small Lewistown, PA, where people lined the streets to watch his motorcade approach, former President Bill Clinton had high praise for the man who has clinched the nomination for the other party.

Mr. Clinton said all three major candidates remaining in the race are talented and special people…. But McCain, who Mr. Clinton said is a “moderate”, “has given about all you can give for this country without dyin’ for it.”

He said McCain was on the right side of issues like being against torture of enemy combatants and global warming, which “just about crosses the bridge for them (Republicans).”

No, no, no. Assuming the quotes weren’t taken out of context — ABC News has screwed over Clinton with this before — Clinton’s comments were wrong on the merits, and the wrong strategic message.

Substantively, McCain isn’t a “moderate,” he doesn’t even claim to be a moderate. It’s a media myth that Dems are trying to knock down, not reinforce. As for McCain on torture and global warming, he’s let everyone down on both recently, as he’s moved further and further to the right. Dems need to remind people why McCain is wrong on these issues, not suggesting he may be right.

And strategically, having one of the leading Democratic candidate’s top surrogates complimenting McCain in a key battleground state really doesn’t seem like a good idea.

The entire trend lately has been discouraging. Hillary Clinton first praised John McCain’s experience, saying he was prepared to be president while suggesting Obama may not be. Soon after she said McCain passed her commander-in-chief test, while suggesting Obama did not.

McCain is playing for the other team. Raising his positives right now is the opposite of what Dems hope to do.

McCain Democrats?

USA Today is reporting on new Gallup Poll numbers among Democrats that show a “sizeable proportion” of Dems say they will vote for John McCain in November if their candidate is not nominated. The numbers are actually shocking! If even a third of these Democrats remain disaffected by November, and vote for McCain, the Democrats are cooked. Recent elections have been razor thin, and if even 5% of Dems vote for McCain, which would probably mean an sizeable number of Independents would also go his way, it will be a huge hill to climb for the Dem nominee.

“A sizable proportion of Democrats would vote for John McCain next November if he is matched against the candidate they do not support for the Democratic nomination,” the pollsters at Gallup report this morning. “This is particularly true for Hillary Clinton supporters,” they add, “more than a quarter of whom currently say they would vote for McCain if Barack Obama is the Democratic nominee.”

Gallup surveyed “6,657 national Democratic voters, aged 18 and older,” from March 7-22. Of that group:

• 28% of those who support Sen. Clinton said they would vote for Republican Sen. McCain in the general election if Sen. Obama ends up being the Democratic presidential nominee.

• 19% of those who support Obama said they would vote for McCain in the general election if Clinton ends up being the Democratic nominee.

Gallup says the results each have a margin of error of +/- 2 percentage points.

Gallup’s analysis:

The data suggest that the continuing and sometimes fractious Democratic nomination fight could have a negative impact for the Democratic Party in next November’s election. A not insignificant percentage of both Obama and Clinton supporters currently say they would vote for McCain if he ends up running against the candidate they do not support. …

It is unknown how many Democrats would actually carry through and vote for a Republican next fall if their preferred candidate does not become the Democratic nominee. The Democratic campaign is in the heat of battle at the moment, but by November, there will have been several months of attempts to build party unity around the eventual nominee — and a focus on reasons why the Republican nominee needs to be defeated. …

Still, when almost 3 out of 10 Clinton supporters say they would vote for McCain over Obama, it suggests that divisions are running deep within the Democratic Party. If the fight for the party’s nomination were to continue until the Denver convention in late August, the Democratic Party could suffer some damage as it tries to regroup for the November general election.

Michael Reagan, son of former President Ronald Reagan, has written an article entitled, “Ronald Reagan Would Back McCain.” In the article, posted below, Reagan makes it clear that if John McCain is the GOP Nominee, he will be ready to campaign with him and for him.

In 1976, the Ford versus Reagan campaign for the Republican presidential nomination got so heated it looked as if my father and Jerry Ford would never again talk to one another.

When it was over and Ford had won, what did Ronald Reagan do? He simply went all-out to help Ford win his re-election, as did I and as did my sister Maureen. My dad simply followed his rule of backing the Republican candidate no matter who he was.

Assuming that John McCain will be the Republican nominee, you can bet my father would be itching to get out on the campaign trail working to elect him even if he disagreed with him on a number of issues.

Unlike my father, a lot of conservatives stayed home in 1976, and we got four years of Jimmy Carter, whose main legacy was to drive the Shah of Iran from power and create the Islamic Republic of Iran with a bunch of wild-eyed mullahs running the show. He also gave us 20 percent inflation and long, long lines at the gas pumps. And don’t forget 440 days of Americans held hostage by the mullahs.

By staying home those conservatives made possible the future election of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

We are still suffering from the legacy of James Earl Carter, thanks to the conservatives who refused to follow Ronald Reagan’s example and instead sulked at home while the nation was being handed over to the worst president in American history.

We were still in the middle of the Cold War in those days, and by staying home conservatives risked losing that war by allowing an incompetent leader to become commander in chief.

Four years later Ronald Reagan took over, the hostages were immediately released, and he went on to win the Cold War. Now we have another world-wide war going on with a hidden enemy sworn to kill us all, and the policy of the Democrats running for the presidency is to throw up their hands and withdraw from the battlefield, leaving it to the enemy, and our fate in the hands of Osama bin Laden.

Is that what the let’s-stay-home-on-election-day conservatives want? Do they want the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate, Barack Obama, as their president? Do they want the pseudo-Marist Barack Obama, who reportedly has a photo of the murderous Castroite thug Che Guevara hanging in his Houston, Texas campaign headquarters, hanging that photo in the Oval Office?

Do they want Hillary Clinton, the duplicitous former first lady, back in the White House enjoying all those furnishings her staff allegedly tried to swipe from the mansion?

Do they want a Democrat spending even more money that the government doesn’t have on scores of programs right out of Karl Marx’s playbook?

That’s exactly what they’ll get if they sit out the election and stay home on Election Day. That’s called biting off your nose to spite your face. Or even more to the point, political suicide.

Let me say this. There has been plenty of battling in the primaries, and I’ve been in the middle of the battle, but until now haven’t committed myself to any candidate, waiting until we had a nominee.

That’s over.

If John McCain is the nominee of the party, this Reagan will happily campaign with him. The alternative is unthinkable to anyone who loves this nation.