After all this talk about Concerned Alumni for Princeton and Judge Alito, Ted Kennedy got his wish and the documents from CAP were released. And sure enough none of the documents so much as mentioned his name. No doubt that the Democrats won’t let go of their guilt-by-association smears, but it’s clear their whole attack strategy against Alito has completely and utterly failed. Alito will become the next Associate Justice of the Supreme Court and the Democrats have made themselves look like preening fools.
One of the cardinal rule in politics is that you never play a game you know you can’t win. Were the Democrats really dumb enough to think that they could smear Alito into submission? Or are they simply playing to the radical left-wing base? Either way it doesn’t look good for them. Their vitriolic opposition to Alito is ultimately futile for them and the PR backlash will end up hurting them in the long run.
Then again, the Democrats are stuck in a Catch-22. If they’d done nothing against Alito, Ralph Neas and the rest of the hard left would have gone apoplectic – and the Democrats are already behind in fundraising and need the hard left’s large war chest. But the more the Democrats embrace groups like People for the American Way, the further outside of the mainstream they get. So in the end, this whole bit of moronic political theater has amounted to nothing but fodder for future GOP campaign commercials. The Democrats know they’ve lost, and their impotence has come out in partisan blather.
It is as Shakespeare once said: “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury yet signifying nothing.”
UPDATE: Roger L. Simon: ““When Mrs. Alito walked out of the room, I thought of Mary Jo Kopechne..”
Ouch.
