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Tucker Carlson is a CNN political analyst and contributes to The Weekly Standard and Talk magazines. He is providing exclusive analysis to CNN allpolitics.com during the election season. |
Tucker Carlson analysis: Bradley's New Hampshire woesBy Tucker Carlson/CNN
January 27, 2000
Web posted at: 5:24 p.m. EST (2224 GMT)
MANCHESTER, New Hampshire (CNN) - New Hampshire ought to be Bradley country. Democrats in New Hampshire are richer, whiter, and better educated than Democrats in virtually any other state. They are, in other words, precisely the sort of progressive Volvo drivers that form the base of Bill Bradley's constituency. If Bradley can't make it here in New Hampshire, he's unlikely to make it anywhere.
And yet Bradley will probably emerge on Wednesday morning as the second-place finisher in the two-man race. What happened?
Consider Wednesday night's debate. Vice President Al Gore opened swinging and never stopped. He implied that Bradley was reckless, heartless and stupid. Then, in a move that will evoke awe from connoisseurs of chutzpah, he accused Bradley of negative campaigning. When Bradley lamely tried to defend himself, Gore attacked him for using unfair tactics.
It was an amazing (and amazingly unfair) performance. But it worked. For all of Bradley's talk of a "new politics" (at one point Wednesday night he even used the phrase "new age"), politics hasn't changed that much. Negative attacks still work. And negative attacks that are left hanging in the air tend to be devastating.
The Republicans, meanwhile, spent far less time complaining about ugly tactics and far more time engaging in them. George W. Bush likened John McCain to Al Gore. McCain responded by simultaneously comparing Bush to Bill Clinton and accusing him of being a Republican Party hack. Alan Keyes, meanwhile, hit McCain with a savage lecture about abortion and the Arizona senator's 15-year-old daughter. (The greatest surprise of the debate may have been that McCain didn't deck him). Throughout the night the candidates shot deadly stares at one another.
Then, without warning, the evening devolved into The Great Mosh Pit Debate. Gary Bauer, apparently bitter over his fifth-place showing in Iowa, launched a kamikaze attack against his nearest rival, Keyes. By appearing at an event that featured the band Rage Against the Machine (and by subsequently jumping into a mosh pit) Keyes had, according to Bauer, committed an offense against decency. Moreover, Bauer claimed, Keyes had listened to some of the same music as "the killers at Columbine." Keyes responded by comparing his time in the mosh pit to the experience of slavery.
It got weirder from there. By the time it was over, McCain's suggestion to Keyes seemed perfectly sensible: "Next time, try decaf." "What a sideshow," said a McCain aide after the debate. "I kept waiting for someone on stilts to come out on stage with a hula hoop."
Performances like this are useful to Bush and McCain, since both seem like Churchill by comparison. Neither bested the other, and for the McCain campaign -- the front-runner in New Hampshire -- that was good enough. McCain will likely win the primary. Bradley will likely lose. And Alan Keyes will almost certain keep soldiering on.
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