Out-of-Touch Hollywood Vacuumheads Love Senator Ho-Hum

Democrats in Self-Destruct Mode CCCXIV

John Kerry: what a great guy. How do we know that? Why, the echo from the news of Ronald Reagan's death hadn't died before the Kerry campaign announced it would suspend public activities this week.

Wow. What a remarkable sign of respect for Reagan. Of sympathy for his family. Of courtesy towards the nation.

Faugh.

The last thing that the Kerry campaign wants this week, or any week, is the continuing reminder of how John Kerry was the Senate's anti-Reagan for eight years in the 1980s. He fought Reagan every step of the way, on both foreign and domestic policy.

And he's The Great Equivocator — who will gladly spend twenty minutes speechifying on the Senate floor, planting one foot firmly on each side of an issue — not The Great Communicator.

(And see this.)

The following stories from last week go together very well.

First, Base yet to unify behind Kerry.

Democrats say they are more unified than ever in their determination to beat President Bush, but there have been desertions in the party's ranks by antiwar activists who back independent candidate Ralph Nader and grumblings from blacks and Hispanics who say Sen. John Kerry has taken them for granted.

The Democrats' troubles with an often-contentious political base do not end there. Most polls show that at least 12 percent of all registered Democratic voters say they will vote for Mr. Bush, twice the number of Republicans who intend to vote for Mr. Kerry.

"There is more unity in this election cycle than has ever been seen before, but that doesn't mean that there is no disagreement and everything is hunky-dory. That certainly is not the case," said Democratic campaign strategist Maria Cardona.

In fact, Democratic insiders acknowledge that many of former candidate Howard Dean's antiwar supporters have not switched to Mr. Kerry's candidacy. Although most have flocked to the Massachusetts liberal's banner, an unspecified number of them are backing Mr. Nader who, unlike the senator, has said he would pull all U.S. troops out of Iraq.

"There are Democrats who are upset with Kerry over his position on the war. You can see that Kerry is aware of that as well," said Kevin Zeese, spokesman for the Nader campaign.

"We met with him and his staff last week and noticed afterwards that his staff said that Iraq was not discussed, when of course it was," Mr. Zeese said. "What I make of that is that he is very insecure about the issue because he wants the peace vote and the war vote."

No one knows yet how many of the antiwar activists, who formed the base of Mr. Dean's army of supporters before his campaign imploded in the early primaries, are backing Mr. Nader. But the consumer crusader is showing some of his largest numbers in heavily Democratic states such as Pennsylvania, where he is polling 8 percent of the vote.

Other episodes of party disagreement have broken out in the last month, when minority leaders expressed their displeasure with the mostly white makeup of the Kerry campaign staff. Among them:

•Last month, Raul Yzaguirre, president of the National Council of La Raza, one of the country's most politically powerful Hispanic organizations, openly complained to Mr. Kerry that not "a single one of your senior staff is Latino."

"Quite frankly, we find this deeply troubling and raise questions about the seriousness of your commitment to diversity."

Democrats say that since Mr. Yzaguirre's complaint, Kerry campaign officials have moved to ease Hispanic concerns.

"There was a meeting the other night of Kerry campaign outreach staffers and Latinos, and it seems things are on the right track now," said Miss Cardona, who is mounting a major Hispanic TV ad outreach drive for the Democrats.

But other Hispanic leaders, who did not want to be identified, said they were waiting to see how much of a policy-making role Hispanics will have in the Kerry campaign.

•Also last month, Donna Brazile, one of the party's leading black strategists who managed Vice President Al Gore's campaign in 2000, attacked Mr. Kerry for not placing more blacks in positions of influence in his campaign.

"The last thing the Democratic Party needs in 2004 is to repeat the failures of its most recent past on matters of race and inclusion," Miss Brazile said.

"If the past is indeed prologue, this message has been lost on Senator John Kerry's campaign, which has failed to understand how to navigate one of the most important issues in American politics: race relations and diversity," she said.

It still isn't clear what personnel changes Kerry advisers have made in response to her criticisms, but her sharply worded remarks raised questions about party unity just as the senator was putting together his national campaign organization.

Democratic analysts said that in the end, Mr. Kerry will have no problems with the black vote.

"Kerry ran very strongly among black voters" in the presidential primaries, said David Bositis, chief polling analyst at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a group that focuses on issues of interest to black Americans.

But Mr. Bositis says there are disagreements within the party that still have to be worked out.

"There are people, the people who supported Dean, who want him to be more aggressively hostile to George Bush on the war, but I don't think he's going to do that. Dean and Kerry have reconciled their differences," he said.

Second, Progressives, Preparing to Advance in One Direction.

The progressives are in town, incredibly well behaved. They're focused and on message. They clap and cheer at appropriate moments during the speeches. There are no hecklers, no splinter groups, no eruptions of dissent over doctrinal impurities.

Progressives are suddenly as disciplined as Republicans. They realize all too keenly that there's a presidential election this fall between one man who is George W. Bush and one man who isn't.

"When your house is on fire, it's not time to talk about remodeling," said author and TV pundit Arianna Huffington, who popped up onstage and in the halls throughout the first two days of the conference.

This progressive jamboree is at the Marriott in Woodley Park, and is titled "Take Back America." The theme is repeated often, and when a speaker says it's time to take back America, everyone in the audience knows what that means. Most of the details of what will happen once America has been taken back can be worked out in January.

"We're going to take this country back and it's going to be election after election after election!" bellowed Howard Dean, recapturing some of the energy of his primary-season heyday as he addressed the crowd yesterday afternoon. "Now and November, we're going to take it back!"

A progressive is what used to be known as a liberal. Liberals stopped being liberals about the time that Michael Dukakis rode around in the tank wearing the Snoopy helmet. A liberal has a bleeding heart and drives an avocado-green VW bus with a peace symbol on it; a progressive has a Listserv and raises money from his mountain biking club.

The 2,000 or so people at the Marriott might also be called the Left. But they're the polite Left, the conference-attending Left, the politically pragmatic Left that has no interest in getting in a skirmish with riot police. These people are not so enraged by globalization that they want to race across the hotel lobby and trash the adjacent Starbucks.

Julian Bond, chairman of the NAACP, said there are more progressives than conservatives in America, except not as many people realize that they're progressive. He added: "I don't consider myself a liberal or a progressive. I'm a militant."

Whatever you call these folks, they're feeling good at the moment. The president's popularity is down, subscriptions to the Nation are up. The most optimistic progressives are talking about more than just a victory in November.

"We want him out, not in a tossup, but in a landslide," Huffington said.

"We couldn't be meeting under better circumstances," Sen. Jon Corzine (D-N.J.) said, repeating the observation twice more as he prepared to introduce Dean.

"The stench of their failure is simply inescapable," declared Robert Borosage, co-founder of the Campaign for America's Future, which sponsored the conference with help from such groups as MoveOn.org, Common Cause, People for the American Way and a little mom and pop union outfit called the AFL-CIO. There are tables with literature about the environment, abortion rights, all the liberal causes, and it's sometimes hard to go 10 feet without someone trying to hand you a pamphlet or a petition, but the event has been remarkably smooth and orderly, sticking to schedule. Dare one say harmonious?

"Bush organizes the left the way Clinton organized the right," Borosage said.

Because of what happened in the 2000 election, the Democrats could nominate an iguana and still sweep the progressive vote. Progressives traditionally struggle with the urge to jump to a third party, but they saw what can happen. Ralph Nader, the erstwhile progressive hero, is conspicuously absent from the conference. Roger Hickey, co-founder of the Campaign for America's Future, said Nader may have been a leader of progressive policies, but "he's a disaster at political strategy."

Hickey made sure there was no doubt about his group's attitude toward Nader: "We're determined that he get the smallest vote possible this time. Because he was a spoiler."

But does the presumptive Democratic nominee, Sen. John Kerry, really represent the progressive agenda?

"We're grown-ups," Hickey said. "I've got a whole agenda that Kerry is not talking about. But how do we get that agenda talked about within the political system? The first step is getting rid of Bush."

Some attendees aren't eager to embrace the Democratic candidate. Michael Smith, a 69-year-old retired peace officer from Santa Cruz County, Calif., and a longtime supporter of the Peace and Freedom Party (he'll vote for Leonard Peltier, who is in prison, convicted of the murder of an FBI agent), said he's been following the theory that the president knew about the 9/11 attacks before they happened — the time, the place, everything. Look at the video of Bush reading to the kids that morning, he said. "He acted not surprised at all."

War and terror are on everyone's mind, but progressives typically focus on what Borosage calls kitchen table economics: jobs, wages, education, health care, retirement, the things parents talk about at the kitchen table after their kids have gone to bed.

MoveOn.org President Wes Boyd showed slides depicting the things that the group's members care about. Boyd spoke quietly, and the room took on a rather hushed tone. Each slide had one word on it, including:

Trust. Family. Freedom. Responsibility. Democracy.

He showed a slide with a word people are tired of: Me. He replaced it with a slide with the word We.

"They're tired of the Me culture. They're looking for the We."

And people understood, especially the Californians.

The biggest applause lines invariably involved Bush. Kerry rarely got mentioned. He's a presumption but not an preoccupation. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton dropped his name once, and got polite applause, but zero whoops and hollers. She got a louder response when she said electronic voting machines should include a paper trail.

Dean explicitly endorsed Kerry several times, each time to warm applause, but he incited a bigger jolt of emotion when he criticized Democrats for not standing up to the president (as did Julian Bond when he declared, "When one party is shameless, the other can't afford to be spineless").

Sen. Clinton showed up Thursday morning to talk about the 50-year project of conservatives to roll back the New Deal, all while ostensibly introducing the next speaker, billionaire George Soros. Clinton declared that "four more years of the Bush administration would leave our country unrecognizable." Soros was equally grave, if a bit more esoteric, assuring the crowd that the Bush Doctrine is a bubble about to burst.

There is an echo chamber quality to an event like this: At some point it's just a pep rally. But paralleling the speeches were training sessions on mobilizing support. The progressives don't want to make any missteps this time.

Dean reminded the crowd of the famous joke by Will Rogers: "I'm not a member of an organized political party. I'm a Democrat."

People chuckled, but Dean quickly added, "It's not funny now that we see what the consequences are."

Third, Zombie Democrats.

DEAF DONKEY EARS

Perhaps even Sen. John Kerry is beginning to sense the total lack of enthusiasm for his candidacy. Kerry seemed alarmed by the complete absence of applause, or other audience interaction, he was receiving from a small crowd in Tampa, Florida, on Wednesday.

Kerry was there to accept the endorsement of a national union of emergency first responders, and to hold a "conversation" with local residents about his plans for protecting the nation from bio-terror attacks.

On several occasions, Kerry paused, seemingly expecting applause for his lines. For example, at one point he said, "I will do what I think is best for the country," then waited for applause that only developed after one of his advance staffers began leading a weak round of applause.

His lukewarm reception was so bad that Kerry lost his cool, telling his audience, "I know you don't want to be here anymore."

"That line actually generated more real cheers," says a bemused Florida Democratic Party official. "If this is the kind of response our campaign is getting elsewhere, we're dead. This was awful. He was awful."

Among the criticisms: beyond arranging for an audience, organizers did little if any preparation to warm the crowd up, to have it ready to cheer on a presidential candidate. "You have to give them something before the main attraction shows up," says the state party official. "These guys did not serve Kerry well. He walked into a dead room, and his own act didn't help."

Last, Stars Take Center Stage at Kerry Fund-Raisers.

Artists are coming out in full force in support of Democratic presidential contender Sen. John Kerry.

Two major concerts will be held next week — one Monday in Los Angeles at the Walt Disney Concert Hall and one June 10 in New York at Radio City Music Hall — to raise money for the campaign.

The Los Angeles gala will feature performances by Barbra Streisand, Neil Diamond, Willie Nelson and Billy Crystal, while the New York show boasts Bette Midler, James Taylor, John Mellencamp, Jon Bon Jovi, Wyclef Jean, Robin Williams and Whoopi Goldberg.

"It's very ambitious. I don't think the artistic community has gotten together to raise this much money in one effort in my recollection," said Jann Wenner, editor and publisher of Rolling Stone, who is executive producing both events. "The artist community is united on this because of the kinds of values that the artist community shares and feels deeply are very threatened by the current administration. Kerry himself has been a longtime musician, a longtime fan of the arts, a longtime supporter of intellectuals' pursuits of civil liberties. These are all the things that this community depends on — the freedom of expression, creative freedom. These are core concerns."

Wenner first met Kerry in the 1970s, during the Vietnam era. Kerry, after serving in the Vietnam War, for which he received a Silver Star and three Purple Heart awards, co-founded the Vietnam Veterans of America and became a spokesman for Vietnam Veterans Against the War. The two rekindled their friendship when Kerry was elected to the United States Senate in 1984.

Wenner also was behind a similar concert in 2002 — in support of Al Gore's bid for the presidency — which reportedly raised more than $6.5 million. It was then that Wenner promised to put on such a show for Kerry if he decided to run for president.

The Los Angeles show also is being produced by Miramax co-chair Harvey Weinstein, Streisand's manager Marty Erlichman and special-event producer Ken Ehrlich. The host committee includes Rhea Perlman and Danny DeVito, Laurie and Larry David, Warren Beatty and Annette Bening, Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen, Dustin Hoffman, Ben Stiller, Robert De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio, Ben Affleck and Rita Wilson.

The concert also will mark the first time Streisand and Diamond have performed together in 24 years. The duo, who attended the same Brooklyn school, will perform their hit duet "You Don't Bring Me Flowers."

"The idea for the Los Angeles show was really to present the American classics, the great big standards," Wenner says. "Willie, Billy, Barbra and Neil — these are people who sing to the heartland of America."

For the New York event, Wenner and Weinstein are working closely with John Sykes, chairman and CEO of Infinity Broadcasting System. The host committee includes Chevy Chase, Jimmy Fallon, Richard Gere, Jessica Lange and Uma Thurman. Darlene Love also will be on hand to do a surprise performance with Midler. Kerry will speak at both galas.

"We did very well with younger voters in the primaries but they will be a hard-fought battleground in the general election, so concerts such as these are an enormous asset to us," said Kerry campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill says.

And now... the rest of the story. From Cindy Adams today (emphasis added):

Not only were John Kerry's scheduled New York and Los Angeles star-studded fund-raiser concerts next week with everyone from Barbra Streisand to Whoopi Goldberg both scratched, but Jann Wenner's VIP cocktail party, which was to precede the June 10 Madison Square Garden affair and was to have everyone from Bette Midler to Paul Newman, was also scratched.

Tickets to both fund-raisers were slow. Tough for Kerry to catch a break. A convention coming up? Former President Clinton has a book coming out. These Los Angeles and Madison Square Garden concerts? Former President Reagan makes his final farewell. Trying for TV? Current President Bush is all over with D-Day. Hoping for mobs? Smarty Jones got the biggest overflow crowd ever. A week he's in town we had Tony Soprano, Tony Awards, even the marriage de jour of J.Lo to another Tony, Marc Anthony....

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I might as well go on record today and say it: come Nov. 2nd, Kerry is going to get clobbered.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Tue. 06/08/04 07:54:43 PM
Categorized as Democrats in Self-Destruct Mode.