Regards, Ivan
Posted on 09/18/2004 4:06:53 PM PDT by MadIvan
Why is John Kerry doing so poorly? By any measure the news from Iraq is grim and seems to be getting grimmer. In several key American swing states, economic anxiety is high. A small majority still declares in most polls that the country is on the wrong track and the president does not deserve re-election. And yet the polls continue to show a Bush edge; the latest Gallup poll puts his lead in double digits.
There are many theories, but the simplest explanation may be the best. John Kerry is a lousy candidate. Just watch him. His voice is a downer, his body language is stooped and defensive, he appears aloof and prolix. He never says in 10 words what he can say in 30.
He sums up a lot of the characteristics of many failed Democratic candidates over the years — from the cramped vision of Michael Dukakis to the torpid drone of Walter Mondale.
For a while his tedium seemed to work in his favour. There’s enough anti-Bush sentiment in the country to push any non-Bush candidate into the White House; and the more people concentrated on Bush, the more they swung toward his opponent, whoever it was.
But there’s no way you can run a low-visibility presidential campaign. And when people took a close look at Kerry, they winced. I mean, even Democrats winced. I have yet to find one who actually believes John Kerry will be a great president. The general sentiment? He’ll do. And we have to get Bush out.
It’s not enough. Kerry also suffers from the fact that he has been a senator for 20 years. If you’re not an indecisive ponderer after two decades in the US Senate, then you’re probably a cocaine addict. These guys give hour-long Ciceronian addresses to empty chambers on a regular basis. They don’t just vote on bills — but on amendments to amendments to the second reading of bills.
Nuance is everything; legislative compromise is vital. And if you then run for president, your opponent has access to an interminable list of votes that can be skewed to make them seem damning.
If you voted for, say, five different appropriation bills in 1988 but against the sixth, and if the sixth contained spending on a military toilet in northern Germany, you can expect a 30-second ad in a subsequent presidential campaign describing you as someone who sold out the troops in their hour of need.
It’s pointless trying to complain. The minute you say things are more complicated than that, you become a flip-flopper, unable to be a commander-in-chief. So you give up trying. There’s a reason senators very rarely run for president and even more rarely win. And Kerry is now finding it out.
He is also hamstrung by the two central issues in the campaign. On Iraq, the base of his party has been opposed to war for 18 months. But the public is more positive; and the swing voters are restless about Iraq but unsure about the next step. So Kerry can be more hawkish than the president and risk alienating his most fervent supporters, he can become Howard Dean and lose the centre, or he can straddle and end up seeming indecisive.
You can see this pattern in his votes on the matter. He voted to give the president the authority to go to war against Saddam (because he feared an easy victory in Iraq); then he voted against the $87 billion (about £48 billion) in military and reconstruction aid for the occupation (because he was battling Howard Dean in the primaries).
So he was for the war and then against providing the money to pay for it. Actually, it was even more complicated than that. He voted for the $87 billion when it was tied to reneging on some of Bush’s tax cuts (a proposal that quickly died); then he voted against it when it stood alone.
Hence, perhaps, his most famous quote of the campaign yet: “I voted for the $87 billion before I voted against it.” If you’re Karl Rove and trying to find a way to tag Kerry as a flip-flopper, you don’t get a better gift horse.
And what does Kerry propose now? Bush has essentially followed Kerry’s advice for the past year — begging for more help from allies, turning over sovereignty, fighting the insurgency and so forth. And the situation is still unravelling.
Kerry has every right to lambast the president for incompetence in war management. But voters want to know what he would do. The answer is: not much different, but I’d get more help from the French. That’s not a winning position.
Moreover, Kerry’s campaign hawkishness on Iraq is in stark contrast to his long record of dovishness. He made his name opposing the Vietnam war; he opposed every Reagan intervention in the 1980s and was a stern foe of the contras in Nicaragua; he was in favour of the nuclear freeze; he opposed the first Gulf war; he voted to cut intelligence funding and many weapons systems over the years.
And he tried to overcome this impression not by telling people why 9/11 had changed his perspective, but by emphasising his own military service in Vietnam. Another mistake, in retrospect.
Many liberals and Democrats believe the Vietnam war was a moral stain on America. Kerry now wanted them to celebrate his participation in it. And, of course, by raising Vietnam as an issue, he also lent some oxygen to the bitter Vietnam vets who ran the ads accusing him of faking his war medals.
As for the economy, Kerry is equally at sea. Bush’s record is mediocre, but his record deficits mean that Kerry can propose few vote-winning programmes without being accused of being fiscally reckless.
To push through his healthcare proposal he has to raise taxes on the rich — allowing Bush to claim he’s an old-fashioned, tax-and-spend liberal. And neither candidate has any real plan to improve wages or the economy as a whole. So it’s a draw on an issue on which Bush should be vulnerable.
To make matters worse, Kerry has helped Bush press his own campaign theme. Bush is campaigning as a plain-spoken simple guy who knows what he believes and sticks to it. This is only partly true. Bush has zigzagged on any number of issues, from free trade to Falluja. But compared with Kerry, he seems very sure of himself.
A typical e-mail I got from readers of my blog read like this: “Just because Bush is not the man you wanted him to be, doesn’t mean that John Kerry is. I mean, he’s John Kerry. President John Kerry. I think that sounds worse than President Al Gore, and that gave me frigging nightmares.” Here’s another: “Kerry would be a frightfully indecisive leader, paralysed like Jimmy Carter. For all his foibles, we need Bush’s steel spine and singularity of purpose.”
Better to be strong and wrong than indecisive and paralysed. I suspect that is the calculation forming in many minds.
That is not to say the race is over. The fundamentals still point to a weak incumbent. Last week Kerry was beginning to find his voice in decrying the Bush record. This was a strong passage on Thursday in an address to the National Guard: “(The president) did not tell you that with each passing day we’re seeing more chaos, more violence, more indiscriminate killings (in Iraq). He did not tell you that with each passing week our enemies are getting bolder. Pentagon officials report that entire regions of Iraq are now in the hands of terrorists and extremists.
“He did not tell you that with each passing month, stability and security seem farther and farther away . . . You deserve a president who will not play politics with national security, who will not ignore his own intelligence, while living in a fantasy world of spin, and who will give the American people the truth.”
It’s a good line of attack; and he may get better at it. His previous opponents have underestimated Kerry’s capacity to focus and fight back when all seems lost. The televised one-on-one debates could be his chance to break out. But the weeks are ticking by. And you can feel the panic in Democratic ranks rising a little higher with every passing day.
Regards, Ivan
Ping!
So Andy is going to vote for Nader?
So9
"Prolix," now there is a word one rarely sees.
I've been hoping Freerepublic would have a poll. The question would be "Who is more boring: John Kerry or Jimmy Carter?"
I used to enjoy reading Andrew Sullivan.
He even looks like Big Ed Muskie in '72.
And from the glassiness of his eyes, he is another Ibogaine addict too.
So9
He sounds mopey - like a jilted lover.
>>>>>"senators rarely run for president and they seldom win">>>>>
Hmmmmmm hillary is a senator.
This is one of their mistakes. Despite the pounding the press has given President Bush the last two years they can't understand that people really like President Bush. All of this anti-Bush sentiment exists only among the hardcore democrats.
Andrew was betting that he would have been able to marry Jim Greevey if JFK was elected.
Kerry has no idea and no ideas.
Things must really be getting bad when the rump ranger faux-conservative crowd starts giving up on Kerry.
Andrew Sullivan.
Andrew Sullivan won't come out and say it, but he knows Kerry is toast!!!
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