After managing Walter Mondale’s presidential campaign against President Reagan in 1984, Bob Beckel went on to a more formidable challenge, to manage the campaign of Owen Pickett to succeed the retiring William Whitehurst in representing Norfolk and Virginia Beach in the U.S. House of Representatives.  My use of the word formidable was a bit sarcastic, but the race was by far the most expensive campaign for a House seat up to that time (1986).  I met Mr. Beckel after Mr. Pickett hired me to be his chief of staff just weeks after he’d won the seat.  I found Bob to be quick-witted with a keen sense of humor, a bit dark, which I appreciated, particularly in light of our profession. I find it increasingly hard to believe that a man that intelligent can still affiliate with the Democratic Party today, but I guess he’s paid well to say what he says, and it’s worth the money to hear a guy be articulate without being obnoxious.  Of course, that isn’t the case all the time.

In his commentary after the debate between John McCain and Barack Obama on September 26, Mr. Beckel noted that Obama admitted that McCain was either “right” or “absolutely right” in answering the moderator’s questions, but that it was “rude” of Senator McCain not to reciprocate the courtesy.  Bob couldn’t have been serious, could he?  When it comes to being courteous to members of the opposing party, McCain is generous to a fault, but he’s not going to lie about Obama’s responses just to avoid being called “rude.”  And anyway, Bob, I think the operative term for disagreeing with Obama’s philosophical positions is “racist.” 

Something Mr. Beckel wrote in his blog last summer illuminates the difference between liberals and conservatives as they are thought of today.  In a piece responding to many posters’ harsh opposition to his calling President Bush “arrogant,” Bob said, “I believe in a liberal political agenda. I have a right to believe what I believe without you calling me a commie.”  Well, I would like to express discomfort with Obama’s desire to surrender in Iraq without my being called a racist, Bob!  But the fact is, although you do have a right to believe what you believe, you most certainly do not have a right to believe what you believe without someone calling you a commie.  You are forgetting that there’s a significant difference between someone calling you a commie and someone putting you in jail for being a commie. 

The left believes that anyone can believe or say or, in some cases, do what he wants without consequences.  Well, obviously not anyone; only those who agree with you on, as you call it, the liberal agenda.  Speech the left doesn’t want to hear is never permissible in the first place.  That’s why there’s a move in Congress to bring back the FCC’s so-called Fairness Doctrine.  Leftists have no natural aversion to denying the rights of people who disagree with them.  Sure, Bob, you have the right to support a liberal agenda, and I have the right to tell you what I think of it, even to the point of calling you a commie, if that’s what I believe.  (If I didn’t think you were a commie, I wouldn’t call you one, but I would still have the right to, and you would have the right to ask me to justify myself.)  To have the right to do what one wants, even to the point of offending others, while insisting that the “victims” of your behavior are wrong to feel offended and that they must never speak of their feelings, is classic political correctness, which is just a weasel word for socialist tyranny, which tells its citizens the way things are going to be and then forbids them to gripe about it.

I disagree with you about conservatives.  They are not “haters” in the extreme sense that liberals are haters, but I wish you well and can’t help thinking that you looked better with eyeglasses.