The Phony Campaign

2007-12-20 Update

Ron and Rudy surge to dump Hillary out of first place! And Fred Thompson shed 84,000 Google hits in five days to now challenge Kucinich for "least phony" honors!

Query StringHit CountChange Since
2007-12-15
"Ron Paul" phony277,000+28,000
"Rudy Giuliani" phony242,000+56,000
"Hillary Clinton" phony234,000-24,000
"Barack Obama" phony217,000-12,000
"John Edwards" phony180,000-30,000
"John McCain" phony163,000-20,000
"Mitt Romney" phony155,000-54,000
"Mike Huckabee" phony151,000+1,000
"Fred Thompson" phony149,000-84,000
"Dennis Kucinich" phony148,000+44,000

It's an exciting time for phony watchers!

  • Senator Christopher Dodd has never registered significant support in the polls, and lacks the comic relief of a Kucinich, so we've never tracked his phony hits. But Shawn Macomber went to Grinnell, Iowa to review Dodd's campaigning from a philosophical point of view:

    "For those of you who don't know me maybe only seen my picture on television or heard my voice, you've been asking two questions since the moment I walked into this room," Dodd said. "And they're very difficult questions to ask, so I'll ask them for you."

    No one can say the senior senator isn't bold or innovative. Usually politicians take questions from the audience and then shoehorn a preferred soundbite into the answer. Here was a man unafraid to streamline the process, to ask and answer his own questions.

    "The first question is 'Who am I?'" Dodd began. The room was silent save for some uncomfortable shuffling, a typical reaction to the threat of late afternoon existentialism.

    "Who would cross the Bridge of Death must answer me these questions three, ere the other side he see." Maybe I'll watch Monty Python and the Holy Grail tonight.

  • Because there's nothin' on TV besides repeats and reality shows and—since I live in New Hampshire—wall-to-wall political commercials. I especially want to avoid seeing Hillary's latest Christmas-related ad again; you need to watch your blood pressure when you're my age.

    But if you haven't seen it, you probably should. It's illuminating, and not in a good way. Prof Althouse has the YouTubed version, with the perfect headline ("I want the government to give me more presents.") and the perfect comment. ("I would have thought this was a parody attacking Hillary Clinton, but she's Hillary Clinton, and she approved of this message.")

    Hillary, of course, is also responsible for the new popularity of a telling oxymoron: "charm offensive".

  • Dean Barnett is a gifted writer and pretty good analyst, so it was especially jarring to see the opening of his Weekly Standard article on Mike Huckabee's "embarrassing and unintentionally comic" efforts to pontificate on foreign policy:

    SINCE MIKE HUCKABEE's meteoric rise in the polls, […]

    Arrrghh, Dean! Meteors don't rise; they fall. (This usage is common enough, however, to also irk the proprietor of the Bad Astronomy website.)

    Other than that, though, Dean's article is great. Check it out, just remember to skip the fourth word.

  • But what's behind the meteoric rise dramatic increase of Ron's and Rudy's phony hit counts? In Ron's case, a quick scan through recent search results finds the p-word flung mostly by his supporters against other candidates, and (of course) the "phony polls" that fail to find much actual voter support for their guy.

  • And in Rudy's case, we're seeing some heated rhetoric out of the continually-arrested anti-abortion protesters outside his campaign headquarters in Manchester. Semi-famous Randall Terry is quoted:

    Randall Terry stated, "The purpose of these protests and sit-ins is to highlight the fact that Giuliani is a hard core pro-abort, and is trying to pass himself off as a conservative Republican.

    "When it comes to moral issues that grip our political debates, there is no difference between Giuliani and Hillary. He must be stopped at all cost. The key is showing that Rudy is a phony — a wolf in sheep's clothing."

    I hadn't really noticed the sheep's clothing myself.

  • But in my travels on the Intertubes, I found phoniness here:

    McCain... wants big government to take over even more of our decisions. Campaign finance reform is allegedly of great concern to McCain. Unfortunately, and this is especially sad for his younger supporters, it is pretty clear now that McCain is a phony on this issue. McCain wants it both ways. He campaigns as the golden knight who will "reform" political fundraising, even as he thumbs his nose at the voters by continuing to take big corporate money AND still doing favors for those companies by leaning on the government agencies that are supposed to regulate them.

    Tough words. Amusingly, they're from New Hampshire's own Union Leader newspaper—back in 2000. This year, the Union Leader is endorsing the "phony" McCain.

    [I should say: the quote is allegedly from the Union Leader. Apparently there are Democrat activists that like to pass around phony quotes from the paper. Tsk!]


Last Modified 2014-12-01 10:19 AM EDT