campaign retrospective: Who was to blame? The Democratic Party, concludes political columnist David Broder. “The Democrats can blame all their problems on the dirty Bush ads if they wish,” writes Broder, “but the difficulty goes much deeper than that. This is a party that needs to get back to its roots, re-examine its thinking, and find new leadership.”… What did it show? “This campaign,” says George Will, “is what you get when one candidate is intellectually devious and the other is running on empty, intellectually. Dukakis [did] not dare to utter his ideas and Bush [had] no ideas to utter.”… Who acted most presidential? Ronald Reagan, says Washington Post’s Lou Cannon, a long-time Reagan watcher: “The campaign has revealed an unselfish streak in Reagan, rare among politicians and especially Presidents, many of whom come to think of themselves as indispensable. Reagan seems happily free of this delusion.” … A pox on both their houses, concluded late-night talk show host David Letterman—he threw his support to Libertarian candidate Ron Paul. “The news made Friday a red-Letterman. day for us,” commented Paul… Roper public-opinion analyst Everett Carll Ladd comments that the structured television debates “would not allow an Aristotle to escape banality. The industry makes the televised debates key tests of strength. When these tests make the candidates look superficial, the industry choruses, ‘Give us substance’” … Pat Buchanan says Bush’s hostile press was a good thing: “When the press batteries open up, conservatives and Republicans, instinctively now, mount up and ride to the sound of the guns.” He adds: “CBS News and Dan Rather are the best thing to happen to the Republican Party since Jimmy Carter.”
“You are 11 stone, seven pounds. You will soon be 73.025 kilos.”
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