Back in the roaring '20s of the Charleston and flappers, speakeasy operator "Texas" Guinan gained immortality with her nightly wisecrack welcoming well-heeled gentry to her illegal Prohibition-era New York saloon, the 300 Club.
"Hello, suckers!" she'd bellow. And they loved it because that nightlife glitterati with money to burn knew they were being clipped.
"Hello, suckers!" might well be the unspoken, but real attitude, of several front-running presidential wannabes who'll never get past important 2008 primaries without hoping voters are gullible and will buy into any claim.
However, they have a problem: today's electronic gadgetry. There are those pesky cell phone cameras that can pass along video to Web sites and TV shows and photo ops. Then come the electronic archives that never forget a fact or statement or video once stored and accessible to anyone, especially those despised negative campaigning researchers looking for nuggets of damning information and slips of the tongue.
Some candidates are trying to spin their way out of contradictory statements and positions that could cost votes. But that won't work: Mischievous critics dig into electronic archives, dredge up old positions and compare them with new ones.
Sen. John McCain and his claim of "Straight Talk" is under attack in a nifty little Internet video—(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ioy90nF2anI)—that makes McCain look guilty of double talk with conflicting positions on the Iraq war and gay marriage. One clip shows him changing positions on gay marriage within 11 minutes while on Chris Matthews' College Tour television show.
Glib, Hollywood-handsome Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who's creeping up on McCain's voter popularity, isn't getting off easy. Scot Lehigh, a columnist for Romney's hometown Boston Globe newspaper, put together a "will the real Mitt Romney please stand up" analysis of Romney's contradictory statements on gays, abortion and gun control—(www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2007/01/19/romney_vs_romney/).
Hillary Clinton has her own problems untangling from the web she's weaved: She's trying to explain away her vote supporting the Iraq war by blaming President Bush's fabrications. However, other congressmen had the gumption to oppose the war, and they had the same information as Sen. Clinton.
The rest of the Democratic and Republican fields simply will rely on making campaign promises they know they can't fulfill, but hoping they can make suckers of voters who fall for easy solutions to complicated problems.
And yet, that worked for George W. Bush. He promised, for example, not to be an international nation-builder or gadfly in other nation's affairs, and now we're at war trying to rebuild a nation.
Pat Murphy
