With time running out and the race too close to call, Virginia Sen. George Allen (R) seemed to believe that he had found the knock-out punch: challenger Jim Webb (D) wrote a novel with some racy scenes 20 years ago, and highlighting them would turn voters away from the strong upstart candidate.
How’s that working out for the Republican incumbent? Consider a new CNN poll, released this morning.
In Virginia, Republican Sen. George Allen — who has watched his once considerable lead vanish after a series of gaffes and controversies — trailed his Democratic challenger, former Navy Secretary Jim Webb, by 50-46 percent among likely voters, which was also within the sampling error.
It’s Webb’s biggest lead to date in an independent poll. Oops.
Now, the race is still, obviously, incredibly close, and Webb’s new-found lead is hardly insurmountable with a week to go, but as Josh Marshall noted, “[S]omething seems to have happened over the last several days in the wake of the Allen campaign’s literary dumpster diving.”
Honestly, what exactly did the Allen campaign think was going to happen here? That conservative voters would turn away from Webb because of a 20-year-old novel? A work of fiction that, it just so happens, was praised by conservatives — including John McCain and National Review — and remains recommended by the Marine Corps.
What’s more, Webb never felt the need to be the slightest bit embarrassed by his work.
Allen now claims that passages from Webb’s fiction are evidence of a candidate “demeaning” to women and children. My first reaction to these Allen-campaign efforts was that they were a parody. But then, I also thought Rush Limbaugh’s attacks last week on Michael J. Fox were a parody. That’s the trick, you see: These attacks are real and effective, in the same way a sucker punch is always effective. It takes away your breath. And into that empty space, elections seem to tumble.
At a rally today at the University of Virginia’s Newcomb Hall, Webb shares the stage with Cleland, but the two veterans — who refer to one another as “brothers” — could not be more different: Cleland, the decorated Vietnam vet and former U.S. senator from Georgia who was unseated after GOP commercials accused him of being unpatriotic, seems almost to have located the humor in the situation. While the ugliness of the attacks on him can still numb the moral brain, his comments this afternoon suggest that he knows it’s all a dirty game. After Webb pushes his wheelchair onto the stage, Cleland waves and grins. He cracks the obligatory Cheney duck-hunting joke to explain his triple-amputee status (“At least someone in the Bush Administration has combat status”), and then he launches into a spirited and moving defense of the soldier’s pledge not to “lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do.”
He notes wryly that the Allen campaign has “attacked Jim for being obscene.” He pauses. “I will tell you what’s obscene. Going to war with no strategy to win is obscene. Obscene is sending Americans into war without proper equipment.” Cleland speaks without notes, and — doubly poignant coming from a man without legs — he devotes most of his imagery to the contrast between Webb’s boots (the candidate wears his son’s combat boots to honor him as he serves) and Allen’s cowboy boots (in a place where “there are no cowboys”). He charges the crowd to use their boots to pound the pavement for Webb. Although Cleland’s war injuries were more brutal and his swift-boating more vicious, he is sufficiently recovered from them both to be passionate and funny and wry. […]
[Webb] finally says the only sentence he needed to say about this whole pathetic episode of swift-boating by close literary reading: “If you’ve been in the Senate for six years and the best you can do is dissect your opponent’s novels, you don’t have much to bring to the table.” The crowd roars, relieved.
Let me use a metaphor that Allen will understand: the funny thing about Hail Mary passes is that they’re frequently intercepted.