Category: Politics

David Brooks nails Sen. Kerry:

What the Democratic Party is going through is not yet a genuine muscular centrist revival. As a friend joked, from the voters of Iowa to the delegates in Boston, there’s been a vast left-wing conspiracy to present a candidate who looks like a muscular moderate, but they picked someone who is not in his heart of hearts a muscular moderate, or anything else.

Indeed.

Josh Marshall says Republicans are planning to use humor to ridicule and diminish Sen. Kerry in the coming month:

The more discussion-worthy point, however, is the use of humor as a political weapon — mockery, derision, diminishment.

Republicans are very good at this. And it can be a tool that is deceptively difficult to respond to or combat. Effective mockery is ‘sticky’, hard to shake off, hard to parry. And it appeals to people’s appetite for fun and humor.

Indeed, it’s not just contemporary Republicans who have a knack for this. There seems to be something intrinsic to the reactionary or right-leaning mentality that gravitates toward this method of political combat. Think of the Tory pamphleteers and essayists of the 18th century in Great Britain or others of a more recent vintage in the US.

This is potent stuff. And Democrats would do well not only to be on their guard but consider applying this approach to the current president, who is more than a bit ripe for such treatment.

Can he really be so naive? The Democrats have Michael Moore packing the faithful into the movie houses for a humorous (and fundamentally false) takedown of the president, Bill Maher attacking the president for an hour a week on HBO, and an entire radio network made up of failed comedians ridiculing him 24 hours a day. Is Marshall really so stupid that he doesn’t realize that Republicans are actually stealing a page from the Democratic Party’s playbook?

This USA Today poll shows Kerry actually losing ground from his convention:

In the survey, taken Friday and Saturday, Bush led Kerry 50%-46% among likely voters. Independent candidate Ralph Nader was at 2%.

The survey showed Kerry losing 1 percentage point and Bush gaining 4 percentage points from a poll taken the week before the Boston convention.

The change in support was within the poll’s margin of error of +/-4 percentage points in the sample of 763 likely voters. But it was nonetheless surprising, the first time since the chaotic Democratic convention in 1972 that a candidate hasn’t gained ground during his convention.

Negative bounce is downright hilarious, but what you should expect from a campaign whose theme song is Let’s Get Retarded:

Let’s Get Retarded, in here…

And the base keep runnin’ runnin’, and runnin’, and runnin’, and runnin’, and runnin’, and runnin’, and runnin’, and runnin’, and runnin’, and runnin’, and runnin’, and runnin’, and runnin’, and runnin’, and runnin’, and…

In this context, there’s no disrespect, so,
when I bust my rhyme, you break your necks.
We got five minutes for us to disconnect,
from all intellect collect the rhythm effect.
Obstacles are inefficient, follow your intuition,
free your inner soul and break away from tradition.

Coz when we beat out, girl it’s pullin without.
You wouldn’t believe how we wow shit out.
Burn it till it’s burned out. Turn it till it’s turned out.
Act up from north, west, east, south.

This is the tune that the Peas performed after the Edwards speech, but some of the lyrics were modifed to suit the NBA playoffs.

Some more reactions to the Kerry speech from the left: Marc Cooper loved it because it humanized him, but he also notes the lack of substance:

On substance: While there were SOME good pushbacks at Bush on several subjects, including the war, and while I liked very much that Kerry said he deals in ?complexities,? he certainly offered no nuance, no detail and no satisfactory explanation of what he would do in Iraq. Or what?s wrong with the current course. I personally do NOT support an immediate withdrawal of troops and I wouldn?t want or expect Kerry to make that call. But he should have clearly said the war was bollixed up, that its $300 billion price tag is unacceptable, that it is creating a backlash that will haunt us for decades to come and that he was going to at least ? shift? if not change course. More on that in the days to come.

Kerry supporters Matt Welch, Mickey Kaus, Jeff Jarvis, Michael Totten, Ken Layne and Kevin Drum were also disappointed by it, or at least underwhelmed.

Kerry’s blandness, his lack of principle and conviction, and his tendency to hide behind platitudes will probably translate into low voter turnout for his side in November.

In the interest of fairness, I should point out that most Kerry-backers loved the speech, but some were paid to love it so you know how that goes.

UPDATE: Michael Totten says in the cmments that’s he an undecided at this point; I was confused by his profession of support for Edwards during the primary season.

Loyal Democrat Matt Yglesias was not impressed by the Kerry acceptance speech:

To put it politely, I thought that was crap.

…Not every speech needs specifics and not every speech needs to be short, but if your speech is going to be long, then it really ought to have some specifics. Otherwise it’s just bloated. Mainly, I’m pissed about Iraq. How to handle Iraq is the most important question facing the president and he just punted. On other looming foreign policy issues (Iran, North Korea, Sudan) where, again, the president can pretty much do whatever he wants we are left with no idea of what a President Kerry would want to do. Nor do we even have a particularly smart backward-looking critique of the Iraq War. It’s bad, of course, that the president wasn’t straight with the American people about the case for war. Nevertheless, if the deception had been in service of a wildly successful policy, this would be the kind of thing one could more-or-less shrug off. Similarly, contrary to Kerry’s accusation Bush didn’t go into Iraq without a plan, he went in with a bad plan. But Kerry doesn’t get into any of this. Nor did he so much as mention our general strategic situation in the Middle East, offering an opinion one way or the other about the alliances with Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt.

I agree with Yglesias. Fifty minutes with a mike and every news camera in the national media on him and all Kerry has to say is “I served in Vietnam” about 18 times and “I’ll be a good president.”

Kerry needs to explain why he voted for the Iraq War and then against the funding, when the latter vote was “reckless and irresponsible” by his own declaration. He needs to lay out the specifics of a plan to combat terrorism, and just blinding assuming that the French, Germans, Russians, Chinese, and Saudis are on-board with whatever Kerry wants to do, when and if he makes up his mind, isn’t going to cut it.

We’re all for jobs, free drugs, good schools, and Helping The Children, but we need to know how any politician who wants our vote intends to accomplish those things, and there was no meat in the Kerry speech on any subject other than his four months of heroic Vietnam service.

Democrats do like to honor the military for a couple of days every four years, but nobody in this country with a two-digit IQ or higher really believes they have any commitment to a strong national defense, so we’re left with a great, large load of steaming rhetorical gas that amounts to exactly nothing.

Watching the speech I had the feeling that Kerry was running for King of some European country, not for president of the USA. Note to Kerry:

It’s not really just a ceremonial position unless you have a VP like Cheney, and if you’re so godawful intellectually curious, worldly, and down-right-fucking-smart, you should be able to show us how all of that brain power translates into policy and action in the 21st century. Do you have a professional campaign staff, or just a bunch of volunteer envelope-stuffers?

H/T Blair-Welch Project.

I’ve been TiVo-ing the Democrats’ convention speeches and scanning them for content. It’s been an unrewarding exercise, as the speeches have obviously been so heavily censored they put you to sleep. The Obama speech has so far been the only exception, apart from Teddy Kennedy’s claim that Republicans are a greater danger to America than Al Qaida and Al Sharpton’s appeal to the lynch mob.

Obama knows the score:

Now let me be clear. We have real enemies in the world. These enemies must be found. They must be pursued and they must be defeated.

And he knows that we’re all in this together. Republicans appreciate this kind of talk; Rich Lowry praised it as did Jonah Goldberg, who summed-up the Obama Monologue for USA Today:

…it was Obama’s speech that captured the imagination. But what was great about his speech would have been more appropriate at a Republican convention. He spoke of the debt we owe to the nation’s founders and to the documents they left us. He spoke of “E Pluribus Unum” and didn’t make nakedly racial appeals.

If Obama ? son of an African immigrant and a white woman from Kansas, raised in Hawaii ? were a Republican and talked this way, he’d be called an “Uncle Tom.” Nonetheless, it’s certainly progress when liberal “rising stars” reject the poisonous identity politics of past Democratic conventions.

Let’s discount for a moment the notion that Obama was pandering to centrist voters yearning for a reason to vote against Bush and assume that he’s making a serious attempt to move the Democrats beyond the fracturous mix of identity-based victimhood and special interest service that’s made prison guards and trial lawyers wealthy and two generations of school children illiterate; what’s he up against?

Contrasting audience reactions to Obama’s speech, stressing patriotism and national unity and downplaying diversity and internationalism, with Al Sharpton’s traditional whining and complaining tells us a lot. The Democrats were respectful and attentive to Obama, but not excited; but Sharpton had the crowd roaring on its feet, foaming at the mouth, ready to lynch the first Republican they could find. Obama stressed family, faith, and responsiblity, and drew polite applause, but Sharpton demanded reparations for slavery and got a standing ovation. Obama is a novelty, an articulate Democrat with a serious nature, a keen intellect, and a sense of grace, but Sharpton is the kind of crude thug who really appeals, in an emotional way, the party elite, the people who come to conventions, work precincts, and carry people to the polls. There are thousand Sharptons for every Obama in the party today.

Men like Obama are the future of the Democratic Party, if it is to have one, but I rather suspect that his time is 20 years away, if not 50. In order to ascend to the top of the party he has to placate or neutralize the unions, the trial lawyers, and the identity groups, and he has to have somebody on his side with money and power. Clinton won over the Gods of Wall St., so that might be a good place to start. And even if he makes no mistakes, it’s going to be a hard slog.

Obama would do better as a Republican, and that’s one party that can get excited about the things he says in his speeches. Somebody should fill the dude in about his real political home, and the Illinois Republicans should give him their US Senate nomination.

Police prepare for rowdy protests on convention’s last day:

Protesters on bicycles snaked through the city Thursday as police braced for a surge in street demonstrations for the windup of the Democratic National Convention.

After four, largely problem-free days, police were expecting a “big day” of protests, since demonstrators typically look for the largest possible audience, said Boston Police Commissioner Kathleen O’Toole. Police tactical teams were out in force, she added, as they have been throughout the week.

With protesters largely confined to the Freedom Cage, I doubt much is going to happen.

Some Democratic Party hacks have claimed that the story about John Kerry’s staged Vietnam movies is staged itself. Here’s the original 1996 story, from that right-wing propaganda organ, The Boston Globe (my copy):

At 2:45 a.m. yesterday, the men were gathering in the den and watching a series of 8mm films that Kerry had taken of the war experience they shared. He even pulled out a B-40 rocket that he captured in the Feb. 28 battle that earned him the Silver Star for bravery.

All of the men recalled, second by second, the series of fire fights on the river that day in which Kerry, they agreed, bravely led a mission that earned the entire boat a presidential citation. All were infuriated by a Globe business column published nine days before the election that raised doubts about whether Kerry’s actions were heroic.

Kerry used a clicker to freeze-frame the footage on the members of his crew. They were young then, and tan and strong. There were jibes about how much hair Del Sandusky, now a salesman in Illinois, had back then. The screen flashed a shot of Michael Medeiros, looking like a high school kid, smiling in sunshine that glinted off the waters of the delta.

Vallely teased Kerry about the films, which some have felt revealed that even as a young lieutenant, Kerry was so intent on his future political ambitions that he made sure he had his heroics captured on film. Kerry looked at Vallely over his bifocals and smirked.

Any questions?