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Ugly August
ByJoe Klein looks at the history of the month:
We have just now completed the month of August, which is the cruelest month for Democrats, the month when Republicans go for the jugular, trotting out arguments some valid, most scurrilous that paint their Democratic rivals as weak, ite or unpatriotic. This is a relatively new phenomenon in American politics, the Bush family's gift to the process. Ronald Reagan never staged an ugly August. He attacked his opponents, but on the high ground of policy. His most famous advertising gambit was a balm: "Morning in America," a series of ads filled with gorgeous American images that didn't even mention Reagan's 1984 opponent, Walter Mondale. But then Reagan was operating at the beginning of a political pendulum swing, utterly confident that his ideas were better than the tired industrial-age liberalism and post-Vietnam pacifism of the Democrats.
