A month ago, Democ­ra­cy Corps released a sur­vey show­ing that Democ­rats were show­ing remark­able strength in the most com­pete­tive 49 House races. On a con­fer­ence call announc­ing the results, James Carville quipped that Dick Cheney must be com­ing out to stump for Jim Ryun in Kansas because that’s the only place he could go.
Now the Pres­i­dent is on his way (per­haps already on the ground. I won’t be attend­ing the event (it did­n’t seem worth try­ing to get the Ryun peo­ple to give me press cre­den­tials), so I’m glad to see that Joel Math­is is live-blog­ging events inside the Expocen­ter, and WIBW will have a live feed online of the Pres­i­den­t’s speech.

I went to the Boy­da ral­ly ear­li­er in the day, and I have to say I was very impressed. Her stump speech has got­ten quite pol­ished, and the crowd was jazzed about her. A Capi­tol Jour­nal pho­tog­ra­ph­er and I joked about the futil­i­ty of the Ryun staffer pass­ing out press releases.

A speak­er from VETPAC explained why they endorsed Nan­cy Boy­da. Sol­diers sent to war with­out ade­quate plan­ning or even body armor, arro­gance in the man­age­ment of the mil­i­tary, and an uneth­i­cal, moral­ly unten­able occu­pa­tion with no end in sight. It’s hard­ly sur­pris­ing that the VFW has decid­ed not to endorse Jim Ryun, even though he’s a mem­ber of the Armed Ser­vices Com­mit­tee and has had more oppor­tu­ni­ties than most to help sol­diers and veterans.

A speak­er from Viet­nam Vet­er­ans of Amer­i­ca made some of the same points, call­ing Ryun “one of the worst lap­dogs” for the Pres­i­dent and “the best exam­ple” Randy Barnes had seen “of a very poor rep­re­sen­ta­tive … and a very good, knowl­edge­able can­di­date.” The Bush admin­is­tra­tion and Mr. Ryun are, accord­ing to the Barnes, “hos­tile to veterans.”

Nan­cy Boy­da got loud applause when she told the crowd that the “fail­ure in Iraq is not a fail­ure of sol­diers, but a fail­ure of lead­er­ship.” She repeat­ed her slo­gan “Noth­ing will change until we change Congress.”

Mean­while, accord­ing to the live­blog­ging of the Pres­i­dent, Ryun and gang stood strong for the sta­tus quo. More spend­ing with­out find­ing ways to pay for these projects. More inva­sions of civ­il lib­er­ties. No change in Iraq, no need for fis­cal respon­si­bil­i­ty, nor even per­son­al respon­si­bil­i­ty for any­thing that’s gone wrong. It seems the two men may be the only ones left who think every­thing is hunky-dory.

We did learn though, that George Bush is not the fun­ni­est man in the world. Appar­ent­ly his open­ing zinger was: “So Jim Ryun says, ‘Do you want to race?’ I said, ‘No, but I want to see you re-elect­ed to the Unit­ed States Congress.’ ”

The day has not been with­out amuse­ment, though.

Appar­ent­ly, at the Bush event, Kansas GOP Exec­u­tive Direc­tor Free­man said that Nan­cy Boy­da’s “answer on Iraq is a bipar­ti­san com­mis­sion. Jim Ryun’s answer is to sup­port the gen­er­als and the troop on the ground.”

But that press release being hand­ed out at the Boy­da event? The title was “Boy­da endors­es Ryun-sup­port­ed Com­mis­sion.” Appar­ent­ly Ryun was for the com­mis­sion before he was against it.