Saturday, September 04, 2004
Dept. of Things in Nutshells
Rich Lowry at National Review's The Corner provides a pithy pre-post-mortem two months before the election is over:
Read all the polls and there is genuine discontent with Bush in this country, but it has nothing to do with what he did or didn't do in Vietnam. Amazingly, Kerry is letting Bush, more or less unchallenged, tap into some of that sentiment--with his proposals to address worries about health care, education, and retirement last night--while he shadowboxes with his own obsessions.
A point no one has made yet about Kerry's midnight ramble, so far as I know: isn't it weird that he framed the whole thing in terms of the main anti-Kerry book title, Unfit For Command? It's like if Clinton kept saying "I'll tell you who the real Slick Willie is!" or Reagan kept referring to how Mondale's act wouldn't have cut it at Warner Bros. Now part of it is just the degraded craft of speechwriting, which tries to fit everything into a repeated rhetorical device (Bush had one of those in his speech too). But clearly this whole "Unfit For Command" thing is eating at Kerry personally like battery acid, and so he obsesses on it and uses any excuse to bring it in and throw it back at Bush's face-- using it, in fact, somewhat inaptly, since the anti-Kerry folks use it as an old-fashioned military-culture character attack while Kerry twists it into a synonym for mere incompetence:
...Doing nothing while this nation loses millions of jobs makes you unfit to lead this nation. Letting 45 million Americans go without healthcare makes you unfit to lead this nation...
No, it makes you the other party, with a different set of priorities. They may in fact be the wrong priorities (I don't think so, but it's possible), but if you think failure to enact universal health coverage makes you immoral, then every president in history is immoral (or you're a Massachusetts liberal).
But the idea of "unfit to lead" is clearly preying on Kerry's mind so much that he's determined to stuff the words back down Bush's throat. The only problem is, no one else cares... the election isn't about "fitness to lead," it's about what you'd do when you're there. By failing to articulate an alternative for much of anything, by insisting that the election is just about character and then mounting himself as a heroic statue and waiting for the admiration to begin, Kerry has left it wide open for Bush to offer the kinds of specifics that close the sale. If "unfit to lead" were truly synonymous with "incompetent at running for president," then Kerry would be in the dictionary next to it.
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Rich Lowry at National Review's The Corner provides a pithy pre-post-mortem two months before the election is over:
Read all the polls and there is genuine discontent with Bush in this country, but it has nothing to do with what he did or didn't do in Vietnam. Amazingly, Kerry is letting Bush, more or less unchallenged, tap into some of that sentiment--with his proposals to address worries about health care, education, and retirement last night--while he shadowboxes with his own obsessions.
A point no one has made yet about Kerry's midnight ramble, so far as I know: isn't it weird that he framed the whole thing in terms of the main anti-Kerry book title, Unfit For Command? It's like if Clinton kept saying "I'll tell you who the real Slick Willie is!" or Reagan kept referring to how Mondale's act wouldn't have cut it at Warner Bros. Now part of it is just the degraded craft of speechwriting, which tries to fit everything into a repeated rhetorical device (Bush had one of those in his speech too). But clearly this whole "Unfit For Command" thing is eating at Kerry personally like battery acid, and so he obsesses on it and uses any excuse to bring it in and throw it back at Bush's face-- using it, in fact, somewhat inaptly, since the anti-Kerry folks use it as an old-fashioned military-culture character attack while Kerry twists it into a synonym for mere incompetence:
...Doing nothing while this nation loses millions of jobs makes you unfit to lead this nation. Letting 45 million Americans go without healthcare makes you unfit to lead this nation...
No, it makes you the other party, with a different set of priorities. They may in fact be the wrong priorities (I don't think so, but it's possible), but if you think failure to enact universal health coverage makes you immoral, then every president in history is immoral (or you're a Massachusetts liberal).
But the idea of "unfit to lead" is clearly preying on Kerry's mind so much that he's determined to stuff the words back down Bush's throat. The only problem is, no one else cares... the election isn't about "fitness to lead," it's about what you'd do when you're there. By failing to articulate an alternative for much of anything, by insisting that the election is just about character and then mounting himself as a heroic statue and waiting for the admiration to begin, Kerry has left it wide open for Bush to offer the kinds of specifics that close the sale. If "unfit to lead" were truly synonymous with "incompetent at running for president," then Kerry would be in the dictionary next to it.
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