Long Face or Pretty Boy?

Democrats in Self-Destruct Mode CCIII

The Inimitable One has a typically delightful column in today's Telegraph.

Last weekend, George W Bush went to Florida for Nascar's Daytona 500 race. His likely Democratic rival, John F Kerry, did not approve. "We don't need," he declared, in the portentous drone he has been perfecting for three decades, "a President who says, 'Gentlemen, start your engines.' We need a President who says, 'America, let's start our economy.'"

Hmm. If this is the best material Senator Kerry's high-price consultants can provide, it is going to be a long, long while from here to November. It's unlikely that any but the most partisan Democrats can stomach nine months of a candidate who is Al Gore without the personal charm and affable public-speaking style. The Massachusetts Senator with the patrician manner and a face as long as his one-liners is the Default Democrat. He is the guy the party's voters fell back on after concluding that Howard Dean, the surging Vermonter, was, in the pithy summation of the union boss Gerald McEntee, "nuts". And McEntee was a Dean supporter.

So Democrats decided that Kerry was more "electable". Which he is, next to Dean — in the same way that, if Saddam Hussein and Robert Mugabe entered the Iowa caucuses, Farmer Bob would be Mister Electable. But, once Saddam had thrown in the towel, you'd start wondering whether Bob Mugabe was really the best you could do.

So, having anointed Kerry as the unDean, a significant chunk of Democrats are now looking around for the unKerry. The only guy available is John Edwards, the pretty-boy trial lawyer from North Carolina. He is 50 but looks about 13, which is kind of refreshing after that strange feeling you get a third of a way into Kerry's stump speech that your body's atrophying and crumbling to dust. In Tuesday's Wisconsin primary, Senator Edwards ran Kerry a strong second and came bouncing out on stage, his fabulous bangs (that's "fringe" in British) dancing in the air like a Charlie's Angels title sequence.

He said that the voters of Wisconsin had sent a message: "Objects In Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear." These words are printed on the wing mirrors of every American automobile, and Edwards meant them as a jocular warning to Kerry: you may be in the driver's seat but I'm closing in fast. He was upbeat and breezy and his line, if only by comparison with the President-who'll-start-the-economy gag, was cute.

At that point, over at Kerry HQ, the frontrunner decided it was time to get Pretty Boy off the air, so he walked out and started his victory speech, knowing the networks would cut away from Edwards to him. Not such a smart move. For the television audience, Edwards's solitary minute was entertaining, Kerry's 20 minutes of hollow stump banalities was a sonorous snoozeroo: "The motto of the state of Wisconsin is 'Forward' and I want to thank the state of Wisconsin for moving this cause and this campaign forward tonight here in this great state. Tonight I say to all of America, get ready. A new day is on the way."

It may be a new day, but already a lot of us are finding it hard to stay awake. As The New York Times put it, when Senator Kerry "bumped Mr Edwards's own ebullient speech off the air, it was as if a pep rally had morphed into math class". When you are too dull a Democrat even for The New York Times, you've got a problem.

On the other hand, if Edwards is the unKerry, he is developing a distressing habit of never doing quite well enough. If Edwards were to come a narrow first instead of a close second, the Kerry bubble would burst: he wins because he's seen as likely to win. Alas, coming a close second is pretty much all Edwards does. He was a close second in Iowa, a close second in Oklahoma, a close second in Wisconsin.

The only difference is that coming a close second in an eight-man race in late January is more impressive than coming a close second in a four-man race in late February. Given that on Super Tuesday, March 2, it will be impossible for Senator Edwards to come worse than second, he really has to win something, and he doesn't seem to have the wit or energy to pull those extra few thousands votes that would put him over the top.

So the race has come down to a weak default candidate v a glamorous insurgent who is not quite glamorous to insurge sufficiently. Other than that, there is not much to choose between them. Both men are enormously wealthy. Kerry was a blueblood of relatively minor means who married a woman worth $300 million and then traded up to a woman worth $500 million. If I were Teresa Heinz Kerry I'd be worried, now Massachusetts is introducing gay marriage, that hubby may start giving the come-hither look to some of the state's elderly bachelor billionaires.

By contrast, John Edwards had a dirt-poor hard-scrabble childhood but managed to sue his way out of poverty. He has made 25 million bucks just from suing tobacco companies. His is an inspirational message: If I can do it, the rest of you haven't a hope in hell. But fortunately I've got a thousand new government programmes and micro-initiatives that will partially ameliorate your hopeless mediocrity. (I paraphrase.)

My favourite line in the Edwards spiel comes about two-thirds in, when, after outlining the regulatory hell in which he is going to ensnare banks, the pharmaceutical industry, etc, he confides: "But I'll be honest with you. I don't think I can change this country by myself." It's good to know the other 280 million Americans aren't entirely redundant. His basic pitch is that the entire electorate are victims, and his candidacy is the all-time biggest class-action suit on your behalf.

Edwards is condescending. Kerry is far too grand to condescend. But both are agreed that America is a vast wasteland of unemployed, shivering, diseased losers. For single-issue guys like me, Edwards barely says a word on Iraq and the war, though I am inclined to think he'd be better than Kerry. The latter seems eager to do whatever Chirac and Kofi want, whereas with Edwards there's always the possibility he will wind up suing the UN Security Council for emotional distress. More importantly, even as he's painting his heart-wrenching portraits of starving children, Edwards is sunny, albeit in a grotesque and mawkish way. And, as a general rule, the sunnier disposition wins (see Bush/Gore, Clinton/Dole, Reagan/Mondale).

It is true that in his five years in Washington Edwards hasn't accomplished anything, but then neither has Kerry, and he has been there four times as long. If Pretty Boy wins somewhere, anywhere, on Super Tuesday, the mantle of inevitability falls away from Kerry. If he doesn't, Dems are stuck with the default guy, and by April they're going to be awful sick of him.

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(Thanks, Charles.)

Here is the NYT article Steyn quotes.

In this unsettled Democratic primary season, time has been John Edwards's friend, and tough competition has always inspired John Kerry, and on Tuesday the searching, independent-minded voters of Wisconsin gave both men a bit more of each.

Senator Kerry racked up another victory, but Senator Edwards's second-place showing made it easier for him to argue that the 29 days since the Iowa caucuses have not been enough time to pick his party's best-tested nominee. Mr. Kerry now faces at least a couple of more weeks of the kind of contest that has helped sharpen his skills on the stump.

Democratic Party leaders designed this year's front-loaded primary process to produce a consensus candidate quickly, without bloodletting and with the broad backing needed to take on President Bush. Mr. Kerry had hoped Wisconsin would make him the near-nominee with just such support — and with an array of pragmatic policy positions on topics from tax cuts, to trade to gay marriage that he contends can make him competitive in November — and he came ever closer.

Still, Mr. Kerry could not quite close the deal, and this famously iconoclastic state gave Mr. Edwards hard evidence for his own lawyer's case that a mere month of voting should not produce a verdict. He won the support of about half the primary voters who made up their minds within the last three days, according to a survey of those leaving the polls. And with Wisconsin allowing independents and Republicans to vote in its open primary, the senator from North Carolina also won the support of roughly 4 in 10 non-Democrats, compared with about a quarter for Mr. Kerry.

Mr. Edwards's campaign skills have improved with each election, and he declared Tuesday that Wisconsin voters had decided, "Objects in your mirror may be closer than they appear." Perhaps, but it is also fair to ask how much a second-place finish, even a fairly close one, in a single state might ultimately matter. The next batch of primaries will not all have Wisconsin's multiparty participation. Mr. Edwards has already signaled he may skip the biggest one, California, and Mr. Kerry now has roughly three times as many delegates.

Howard Dean has seen his own candidacy come full circle from asterisk to afterthought, with a few heady months as a fiery, front-running asteroid in between. He had staked out Wisconsin as his last stand, but came in a distant third. "We are not done," he vowed, but he may be. Depending on how and whether he decides to retool his efforts — as a quest for personal vindication or as a journey to keep molding the party he briefly electrified — he has already largely framed the terms of the debate. Both Mr. Kerry and Mr. Edwards now covet his support, and his supporters. And Mr. Kerry now calls his own campaign a cause.

If Dr. Dean spent months allowing restive Democrats to feel that it was good to be angry, Mr. Kerry began persuading voters last month that it would be better to get even — for the election of 2000. In his final rallies here, Dr. Dean was still urging voters to send a message to Washington, while Mr. Kerry long ago asked them to send a president. Now, Mr. Edwards is arguing that he deserves yet another look, and though he has lost 16 states, just enough voters have kept agreeing with him to keep him in the race.

"This is a great place for the Democrats to be," said Mandy Grunwald, a media consultant who advised Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut until he dropped out of the race earlier this month. "The president's on the defensive," she said. "I think if this goes on some more, it actually isn't so bad for the Democrats, or for Kerry, to keep going out there. The American people are learning more and more about John Kerry and the Democrats, all of which is good, and I'm not that eager to shift to the Republicans training their full fire on one person."

Members of any party were allowed to participate in Wisconsin's primary, and about twice as many people who called themselves Republicans voted here on Tuesday as in any other state so far, offering at least a tentative hint of Mr. Edwards's potential appeal in a general election.

Mr. Edwards again did significantly better than Mr. Kerry among voters who said that the economy was the issue that mattered most in making their decision, the survey found. That issue was cited by more voters here than any other — roughly 40 percent — and Mr. Edwards won nearly half of their votes, compared with about a third for Mr. Kerry. Among the 20 percent of voters who said that the impression that the candidate cared about them was most important, Mr. Edwards drew close to half, compared with about a third for Mr. Kerry.

The survey of voters leaving polling places throughout the state was conducted by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International for the television networks and The Associated Press.

Mr. Kerry's and Mr. Edwards's contrasts with each other are mostly textbook questions of style and tone. On Tuesday night, when Mr. Kerry took to television to claim victory and bumped Mr. Edwards's own ebullient speech off the air, it was as if a pep rally had morphed into math class.

Still, as Representative Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts, a Kerry supporter, put it, "President Bush said that he was a uniter and not a divider, and he has united the Democratic Party in a way it has not been united in a generation." He added: "Every candidate is now 95 percent on the same sheet. Each has a different articulation of it, but they all oppose Bush in the same way."

If Mr. Edwards, who has run an upbeat campaign, is to continue as an alternative to Mr. Kerry, he will face pressure to begin drawing some sharper differences with his opponent. He suggested one possible approach in their debate Sunday night by gently mocking Mr. Kerry for a long-winded answer about his vote to authorize Mr. Bush to use force in Iraq, a position Mr. Edwards shared.

Mr. Kerry did not wear especially well in the period in early 2003 when he was seen by many party leaders as the presumptive front-runner. Only after he slipped far behind Dr. Dean in the polls and joined him and Mr. Bush in opting out of public financing and the spending and contribution limits that come with it did Mr. Kerry begin to rebound.

Joe Trippi, who built a half-million strong Internet-based following as Dr. Dean's campaign manager until he was replaced after Dr. Dean lost the New Hampshire primary said, "Even the opt-out happened because of Dean. We moved the entire debate."

Mr. Edwards is now betting that he can move it some more.

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Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Sun. 02/22/04 07:53:44 PM
Categorized as Democrats in Self-Destruct Mode & John Kerry & Political.