So many conservative blogs and Twitterers are joining in the hysteria directed at the Cain campaign because campaign manager Mark Block erroneously stated last night that the son of accuser Sharon Kraushaar works at Politico. I heard it when he said it on the Hannity show, but it turns out that the person Block was referring to has the same last name but is not her son and does not work at Politico anymore.
Sloppy move by the Cain campaign, another misstep among many the past 10 days. Much like the unsupported blame-game (Perry, Rahm, the Democratic Machine) it makes Cain look amateurish. But did it really warrant the hyper-reaction?
Robert Stacy McCain is right that joining in the contrived hysteria directed at the Cain campaign is damaging to whomever the nominee ends up being:
Weakness is not an attractive quality, in politics or anything else, and it is an error in political combat to worry about making the “smart” argument when what is needed is a winning argument, or at least a gesture of solidarity and a show of force that lets our opponents understand that we’re not a bunch of gutless weaklings.
McCain links to a post by Dr. Helen Smith which I meant to link to but was, er, distracted, Conservatives: Don’t Play into Alinsky’s Hands. Referring to a post by Andrew Klavan insisting that it is just, right and proper to hold Cain to a higher standard than Democrats hold themselves, Dr. Smith writes:
Bullshit. What Klavan is advocating is political suicide. He might as well have taken his playbook from Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals where Alinsky’s fourth rule is “Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules. You can kill them with this…”
Yes, we should have standards and those standards should be higher than Democrats set for themselves. But those standards do not mean we have to join in every petty overwrought hyper-ventilated reaction from the left-blogosphere against one of our candidates.
And for all the not-liberal bloggers out there who joined in, don’t worry, your candidate will get his in turn.
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