Kennedy Self-Implodes Over Debates

The Kennedy campaign’s partisan statements are rapidly becoming as grandiloquent and inaccurate as those of the McCain campaign. In an email sent out last Saturday, the following sentence stood out:

At 5 o’clock last Friday, Mary Landrieu sent notice to every Louisianan that she couldn’t care less about debating the critical issues we face.

This is pure partisan nonsense. The ‘notice’ the Kennedy campaign refers to is a press release from Landrieu’s campaign team simply confirming her attendance at three debates.

The Kennedy campaign have made it perfectly clear they want more debates, indeed a fourth was added last week, but to claim Landrieu “couldn’t care less about debating the critical issues,” especially after she agreed to four debates, is immature and irresponsible political posturing.

It doesn’t end there. The Kennedy campaign’s debate clock widget, still featured prominently on his website’s homepage, started out as a clever innovation to involve grassroots activists in persuading Landrieu to debate. It has now descended into farce.

Landrieu officially agreed to debate Kennedy September 19th. 11 days later and the clock is still ticking. I must admit I am now rather puzzled as to what more Landrieu has to do to make it stop? After all, the Kennedy campaign’s widget only calls for her to debate, not to debate X number of times. Perhaps it’s just yet another political miscalculation by the bumbling operation that is the Kennedy campaign.

However, there is a more serious point here. Disingenuous and duplicitous attacks, such as these, poison our politics. Much of the electorate already assumes all politicians are inveterate liars, a very sad state of affairs. Many observers relish the knockabout nature of Louisiana politics, but nobody can deny the willingness of politicians to launch such desperate attacks is damaging to both politicians and government at large.

It took the national media several weeks before they began regularly questioning the veracity of the McCain campaign’s more outlandish claims. How long will it take their Louisiana counterparts? Or will they merely sit back, enjoy the sport and let the every increasing number of unsubstantiated claims and half truths go unreported?