Thursday, September 14, 2006
Campaign Problems
In Southern Nevada, which can be described as the county that Las Vegas is in and the Southern part of the next county to the west, there is a race for US Congress going on. It involves an incumbent named John Porter, a Republican of reasonably good reputation, and his young upstart opponent, Tessa Hafen, former aide to Senator Reid. It is not a race of great national import, unless the count of party members in the house is exactly even save one, but it is illustrative of the problems faced by both parties in campaigning these days.
Tessa Hafen is calling her opponent a “yes-man” and repeating national DNC phrases such as “fire Donald Rumsfeld.” Heck, the way Rumsfeld looks he’s most likely already dead, but that’s not my point. She’s doing attack ads, negative campaigning, which I suppose is not untypical for the underdog party (and she’s from Nevada of all places.) The trouble for her is that I really don’t think they’re going to work all that well. I think people are really pretty tired of hearing other people insulted, even if it seems to be true, and in this case I really don’t know if it is or not; this is my first opportunity to judge Mr. Porter. Porter, for his part, has so far run only ads touting his dedication to the people of Nevada, his independence and strength, that sort of thing. Based on what I’ve just written, Porter looks like a shoe-in. If it weren’t for one little problem.
That problem is that the local Republican leadership is challenging Hafen’s credentials in court, saying that she’s not a legal Nevada resident. For the past ten years she’s been an aide to Senator Reid, living in Virginia. She’s always maintained a legal residence in Nevada, which is a typical thing for an aide to a Senator to do (legally reside in their home state, I mean.) Now, rather than make Porter look like the good guy who’s above the petty negative campaigning, the local division of the RNC is making Porter look like a guy who’s afraid of losing his job. They’re also raising memories of the gerrymandering they’ve done in Texas and attempted elsewhere in recent years. I doubt if they have a case against Hafen at all, but all of a sudden I wonder what’s wrong with Porter that they feel the need to use that sort of tactic. They’re not stupid, so they’ve got to know that they have about as much chance of getting her disqualified as they do of getting John Kerry to vote for their candidate in 2008. Still they persist, which makes me, and I’m sure other people in Southern Nevada as well, wonder what the heck their problem is.
It will be interesting to see which mistake proves the least fatal come November.
Labels: Politics
