Boston Globe columnist Eileen McNamara is as smart as a whip (I had the pleasure of teaching her a course or two at Harvard Business School), witty, and on the left end of the spectrum. She's also honest and perceptive. So I take very seriously her warning  to John Kerry that he's made yet another big mistake, this time in hiring John Sasso, a dirty tricks artist from the cesspool of Massachusetts hardball politics.

...party insiders in Massachusetts.....have been toasting Sasso as a political genius for so long that they might have overlooked how his idea of good, clean fun will play in the heartland, where so many of those battleground states are to be found. It won't. His is exactly the wrong voice to be whispering in Kerry's ear now that America is back from the beach and paying attention to presidential politics.
Sasso began taking a more public role in the Kerry campaign even before the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and its Republican—backed smear campaign threw the candidate off—message and on the defensive. It was Sasso's signature on a fund—raising letter last month from the Democratic National Committee, accompanied by a machine—autographed glossy of Kerry and his running mate, John Edwards.

The problem with soliciting contributions to end the "smug and arrogant tactics of misinformation" that Sasso's letter rightly attributes to Republicans is that it only works when the purveyor holds the moral high ground. That would not be Sasso, he of the attack video that torpedoed the presidential campaign of Democratic Senator Joseph R. Biden of Delaware in 1987, he of the audiotape that ridiculed the physical disabilities of the wife of Edward King, Michael Dukakis's gubernatorial primary opponent in 1982.

Dukakis fired Sasso for lying about his involvement in the video.

I doubt very much that Kerry will listen to Eileen's good advice. He is off—balance and reacting emotionally. His sugar—momma was just briefly hospitalized for dizziness and stomach pains, an indication to me that the fun has begin to fade for She Who Must Be Obeyed (because she pays the bills). Kerry is living on Planet Stress, and only knows how to get mean and dirty himself, when the heat goes up.

Posted by Thomas   9 5 04