Republican Attack Machine Recruits Dem Candidates

The "Vast Right Wing Conspiracy" has given way to the "Republican Attack Machine." We are told that all of Senator Kerry's problems are really just manifestations of the RAM. Yet I seem to see many attacks coming from the other side of the aisle.

In WSJ OpinionJournal's Political Diary, Holman Jenkins, Jr. says that Democrat candidates in Red states are distancing themselves from the party's nominee:

But one who apparently doesn't feel a need for what Mr. McAuliffe is selling is Inez Tenenbaum, running as a Democrat to fill Fritz Holling's soon-to-be vacated South Carolina senate seat. Her hometown paper, Columbia's "The State," observed yesterday her campaign is "going to great lengths to distance itself from John Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee."

The survival instincts of politicians are finely honed and sometimes a more reliable evidence of the political state of play than even the polls. Ms. Tenenbaum isn't the only one keeping Mr. Kerry at arm's length. Democratic Senate hopeful Chris John in Louisiana and Oklahoma's Brad Carson have embraced the constitutional marriage amendment rejected by Mr. Kerry, and both take pleasure in separating themselves from him on gun issues. Alaska Democratic Senate candidate Tony Knowles has pronounced the Democratic standard bearer "just wrong" on Alaskan oil drilling.

It's too early to say whether red state Democrats have decided Mr. Kerry is poison, but a lot of political calculations are being re-run in light of evidence that Iraq troubles have not shifted sizeable numbers of voters from the Bush camp to the Kerry camp. A new Pew poll out this morning shows a 5-point jump in Mr. Bush's approval rating just in the month of April. And Mr. Kerry's latest stab at changing the subject to Mr. Bush's National Guard service is not likely to prove particularly productive. Mr. Bush's lackluster record was the subject of a full media bonfire two months ago and he should be immunized by now. Meanwhile, thanks to late-surfacing video from the 1970s, many voters are learning for the first time about the faux nature of Mr. Kerry's gesture of throwing his Vietnam medals away in protest against the war. And it's the fauxness of the gesture that's killing him.