Word: augustness
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...understand why McCain's election would be so awful for the GOP, start with the obvious: the party is flat on its back. According to the Pew Research Center, through August 2008, the percentage of Americans who identify themselves as Republican is lower than in any of the previous 15 years. The party is probably headed for another round of deep losses in the House and Senate. Asked recently by the Pew Center to choose between a generic Democrat and a generic Republican for Congress, registered voters under 30 gave the Democrats a 22-point lead...
From Hurricane Frederic in 1979 to tropical storm fay, which ravaged Florida in late August, Americans affected by disaster have looked to the Federal Emergency Management Agency for aid. But long before its error-plagued response to Hurricane Katrina (which marked its third anniversary Aug. 29), critics complained that FEMA, meant to epitomize state humanitarianism, was a synonym for government dysfunction...
...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, élite 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...
...George H.W. Bush - or rather, his designated sleazeball Lee Atwater - gave us the first truly ugly August, in 1988. Atwater had conducted a series of focus groups among blue collar Democrats in Paramus, N.J., in May and found all sorts of fodder: Michael Dukakis was "against" the Pledge of Allegiance. More substantively, Dukakis ran a weekend prison-release program in Massachusetts that allowed an African-American felon named Willie Horton to go on a killing spree. But what was most distinctive was a new tone: a derisive, sarcastic negativity that predicted, and enabled, Rush Limbaugh's brilliant, destructive trade...
...repentant Atwater died of brain cancer before he could slice and dice Bill Clinton in 1992, and Bob Dole was too honorable to try in 1996. But the arrival of George W. Bush and Rove - an Atwater protégé - brought August back with a vengeance in 2000 and, spectacularly, with the "independent" Swift Boat campaign against John Kerry...