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The Weblog at The View from the Core - Friday, September 24, 2004
   
   

"Memo To The JFK Wannabe: How To Save Your Campaign"

A reader writes:

There is only one windward tack you can steer that will lead you to the White House in January 2005.
First you must jettison your Russian/Germany/French fantasy wish list baggage. The American public aren't buying it. Then you must out-Bush Bush and put the Syrian and Iranian dictatorships on notice that their complicity in fostering the all out terrorist attacks in Iraq (to put you in office) will be met with direct retaliation and total defeat. Might as well, cause that's what Bush must and will do after November 2nd. Why not beat him to the punch with a first time (for you) realistic stand? Your "Peace At Any Cost" followers won't mind. They have no where to go, and besides they're permanently blinded by their Bush hatred. They will accept any tack to win, convinced you will bail out on it after the election.
While you're at it put out the mantras that you will do whatever it takes, without raising taxes, to save Social Security, the Energy crisis, national health care crises and the environment. Might as well get totally positive and bet that your extraordinary gift of gab can carry the day.
Get off Bush's case. You and your 527 minions have brow beat him enough. Your base doesn't need it anymore. Bush's followers and the undecided resent it. Adapt the Ann Richard's approach. You know, "Po-o-r George". Remember, reasonable people don't accept your criticism barrage that every thing Bush looks at turns to salt.
Maybe these approaches will plant your sterile seed with the vast middle ground and fulfill your drive to be the reincarnation of the real JFK. Unfortunately for you, someone we all admire will come forward and say, "I knew JFK and your no----".
Abe Lincoln said it best, "You can fool some of the people some of the time-----". Go with it. It's your only hope.
Good luck (you're going to need it).

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Fri. 09/24/04 10:16:42 PM
Categorized as Political.


   
   

"Unconquered Men"

A poem by Russ Vaughn.

Our favorite Screaming Eagle Poet writes to The Blog from the Core again.

Unconquered Men
(With veneration to Ralph Waldo Emerson's Concord Hymn)

From Swift Boats they did brave the flood,
Their flag to autumn's breeze unfurled,
Here again, embattled sailors stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.

Their foe no longer silence kept,
Believing that the veteran sleeps;
That Time's assured his treason's swept
Down history's stream which backward creeps.

'Tween hostile banks of media's stream,
They fixed the sights of truth's own gun;
Seeking but their honor to redeem,
And stay the march of Judas' son.

Their Spirit made these warriors dare
To keep their nation's honor free,
But Time and Nature will declare
Their honored place in history.

Russ Vaughn
2d Bn, 327th Parachute Infantry Regiment
101st Airborne Division
Vietnam 65-66

As I've said before, I think it's going to turn out that John Forbes Kerry lost his bid for the presidency on April 22, 1971.

See also these.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Fri. 09/24/04 10:09:54 PM
Categorized as Political.


   
   

"Kangaroo Courts Are Killer Courts"

A statement from Citizens United Resisting Euthanasia (CURE).

Berkeley Springs, WV (September 23).

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Anyone familiar with America's long and shameful history of indifference and hostility to persons with disabilities will not be greatly surprised by the death sentence imposed on Terri Schindler Schiavo by the Florida Supreme Court.

Anyone with an ounce of decency, however, should be outraged. And anyone who cares in the least about his life or the lives of those he loves should be alarmed.

While those seeking to murder Terri have denied her the opportunity that she deserves for rehabilitation and while they have distorted Terri's condition in their Goebbels-style campaign to dehumanize her, this battle has never been about the medical facts.

Nor should it be! The life of a person living in coma deserves no less protection than the healthiest TAB (temporarily able bodied person). In fact, it requires and deserves greater protection, and any civilization that has transcended the jungles of social Darwinism would provide it.

If the life of every innocent person does not enjoy the full protection of our laws and courts then no man's life is safe from the tyranny of unjust courts like those that have repeatedly provided legal cover for Terri's impending murder as they have once again done today.

Kangaroo courts are killer courts, and their ultimate victim is civilization itself. Defend life! Defend Terri! In doing so, you are defending the noblest ideals of our once great nation.

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Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Fri. 09/24/04 08:21:06 PM
Categorized as Terri Schindler Schiavo.


   
   

Mystery Pollster

Vide.

(Thanks, Peter.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Fri. 09/24/04 07:13:21 PM
Categorized as Blogosphere Stuff.


   
   

"Oh, Who Cares?"

Democrats in Self-Destruct Mode CCCLXXXIII

While in Arizona, Sep. 22, talking to a reporter from Phoenix's KPNX-TV Channel 12, Teresa Heinz Kerry disses an entire state.

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.... 12 News Reporter: Most of the polls are tracking that Sen John Kerry as doing a better job on the economy. My question is, why hasn’t that transferred overall in the poll numbers?

Teresa: It has, of course. Of course it has.

Reporter: He’s still down.

Teresa: He’s not. Did you see the polls today? You saw Zogby and ARG —

Reporter: Yes, but he’s still down in Arizona.

Teresa: Oh, who cares? You know, one state is not a whole state. In the whole United States, he is even, even, and in some of them one point ahead, and in some one point behind....

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One cannot help but think of how Mr. Teresa's campaign had dissed one of the biggest radio stations on the planet and how he had earlier dissed an entire region of the country. (Well, I guess you can't help but think of them if you're keeping track of Democrats in Self-Destruct Mode.)

And, surely, Faithful Reader, I hardly need to remind you how this exemplifies the significance of Core's Law of New Media.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Fri. 09/24/04 06:26:16 PM
Categorized as Democrats in Self-Destruct Mode.


   
   

The Latest on CBSgate X

The saga of Daniel Milhous Rather continues.

Okay. Not necessarily the latest. Just the latest I've found. Things seem to be slowing down. And there's not much, if any, new news, just opinion.

Honest CBS Logo

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Fri. 09/24/04 05:56:23 PM
Categorized as Media.


   
   

Re: Some Personal Stuff

Ack.

Since I live in a county that was declared a disaster area because of the recent flooding, the bank has decided that the appraiser must come to the house again and take more pictures to show that it had not been flooded. I gather that most banks have done the same with other loan applications. Consequently, the appraiser is overwhelmed. ("Bombarded" was the word used. Twice.) So, keep on praying. :-)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Fri. 09/24/04 05:39:27 PM
Categorized as Other.


   
   

Dukakis Redux?

Democrats in Self-Destruct Mode CCCLXXXII

John Fund thinks history may be repeating itself. (Italics and ellipses in original.)

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Harold Meyerson, editor of the liberal magazine The American Prospect, tells a story of a friend of his who had a dream. He was walking through the headquarters of the Kerry campaign. Behind a door marked "Campaign Manager" he found Kerry manager Mary Beth Cahill. As he drew nearer, however, the woman suddenly ripped off her Cahill mask, behind which was... Susan Estrich, Michael Dukakis's campaign manager! Mr. Meyerson's friend woke up screaming.

Lots of Democrats are having similar nightmares about 1988, when Mr. Dukakis, once ahead 17 points in the polls, lost by eight to George W. Bush's father.

Says one Democratic consultant: "I would have called you crazy if in 1989 you would have told me that a decade and a half later this party was going to nominate Dukakis's lieutenant governor — another aloof Massachusetts liberal who would overconfidently feel he would mop the floor with this clueless guy named Bush. But I fear I've seen this movie, and it's 'Groundhog Day.'"

Like Mr. Kerry, Mr. Dukakis was a liberal at heart, but both were perceived as moderates until the fall campaign. Reporters, most of whom supported both Democrats, did all that they could to prop up that image. The need to preserve a moderate image prompted both candidates to talk evasively about issues; in his convention speech Mr. Dukakis famously declared: "This election is not about ideology, it's about competence."

"That strategy ran into trouble when their opponents adopted the simple expedient of pointing out their liberalism using ads with specific, undisputable examples," concludes a study by Indiana University's Erik Rasmusen. "At that point, their advantage in the polls started evaporating."

Liberal journalists have started to pile on the Kerry campaign. "Kerry is Dukakis, after all," sighs Joe Klein of Time magazine. "Deadly dull, slow to respond, trapped in Democratic banality; he actually said he was for 'good jobs at good wages.'"

Craig Crawford, now with Congressional Quarterly and MSNBC, spent 1988 covering the Dukakis campaign. "Do I see parallels? I see only parallels." He notes that many of the same players he knew are back: Bob Shrum, a key adviser to Dukakis, is now Mr. Kerry's top strategist. A top Dukakis deputy, Tad Devine, is Mr. Shrum's deputy in the Kerry campaign. John Sasso, Mr. Dukakis's chief of staff, is Mr. Kerry's top aide on his campaign plane. Joe Lockhart, the former Clinton press secretary, got his start on the Dukakis press operation.

Mr. Crawford agrees that Mr. Kerry has shown the ability to come back from behind, as he did against Howard Dean this year and when he defeated the popular Gov. William Weld in 1996. "But Kerry has only run against Massachusetts Republicans, and the national kind are tougher and more conservative than he's used to," he points out. "I think he's a little shell shocked."

The election is not over, and foreign events or the debates could change the polls dramatically. But it's not too early to ask how Democrats wound up making many of the same mistakes that crippled the Dukakis effort. Leading Democrats agree on many of the problems plaguing the Kerry campaign:

Bad campaign visuals. "I smell the same New England genius that I smelled in the Dukakis campaign in 1988,'' Gerald Austin, an Ohio political consultant, told the New York Times. "Where do they put him for photo opportunities? Snowboarding in Sun Valley, shooting skeet in the Ohio Valley, and windsurfing off that great working-class vacation paradise, Nantucket."

Others blame a chaotic staff structure with too many decision-makers and an indecisive candidate. Mr. Kerry is addicted to telephone conference calls in which he will sample the views of several aides, seem to come to a decision and then reverse or modify it after one-on-one conversations with others.

Buying into a myth that Mr. Kerry couldn't be labeled another Massachusetts liberal. "He's a guy who actually shot communists and, when he was a district attorney, locked up murderers," says Rep. Barney Frank. But Mr. Kerry has a 20-year Senate record, one that at times has put him to the left of Ted Kennedy. Mr. Kerry doesn't like to talk about his Senate record, but that doesn't mean Republicans will ignore it.

Losing control of the message. "If pitching is 75 percent of baseball, then 75 percent of election victory revolves around the definition of the campaign," Pat Caddell, the pollster for Jimmy Carter's 1976 and 1980 campaigns, once wrote. "He who sets the definition of the campaign usually wins."

Mr. Devine has admitted that the Dukakis campaign failed to "run a general election in broad thematic terms that are cultural and historical. But you get so wrapped up in what you're doing, sometimes you lose a lot of focus."

That is also what appears to have happened to Mr. Kerry. In August, 1988, Michael Dukakis repaired to the Tanglewood Festival in the Berkshires and failed to respond to attacks on his prison furlough program, centered on the murderer Willie Horton, who raped and brutalized a Maryland couple while out on weekend release. This year, Mr. Kerry hung out in Nantucket and allowed himself to be filmed windsurfing while the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth pounded him for nearly a month with little effective rebuttal. "The Bush people have a very effective message: the president is tough on terror and John Kerry is either too liberal or too indecisive to do the job. That's become the campaign backdrop," says GOP consultant Charlie Black.

Now some Democrats are overreacting in panic to Mr. Kerry's drop in the polls. Ms. Estrich, now a commentator and newspaper columnist, says the lesson of the Dukakis campaign she ran was that "the trouble with Democrats, traditionally, is that we're not mean enough." She laid out the alternative strategy: a "long and ugly road" to November." She suggested it was time to dig for Bush scandals, from his Air National Guard service (already done) to his prior drinking. "As Larry Flynt discovered, a million dollars loosens lips. Are there others to be loosened?"

As a desperation move, such talk no doubt as its appeal. In 1988, Donna Brazile, then an aide on the Dukakis campaign, lost her job after she openly accused George H.W. Bush of having an extramarital affair. The incident hurt Mr. Dukakis. This year similar tactics are unlikely to work. George W. Bush has a four-year record in office that can be judged for good or for ill. He is not a stranger to the American people, and his faults are not unknown.

Even if Democrats have nothing to do with kamikaze attacks on Mr. Bush, they could still be hurt by them. Mr. Caddell says that if the documents CBS News used to claim Mr. Bush shirked his duty in the Texas Air National Guard are proved to be forgeries, "it would be the end of the race." He explained to Fox News that Democrats "have gotten themselves so involved in this issue that if they're not authentic, they're going to be blamed for it. It's incredible to me that they've gotten in this. I'm trying to save my party, you know, by telling the truth."

No doubt few Democrats will agree, but Mr. Caddell's larger point — that the Democratic Party will have some soul-searching to do should Mr. Kerry lose — is clearly valid. A party that is so myopic as to repeat so many of the mistakes it made in an historic loss only a decade and a half ago is a party that needs to re-examine its relationship with the American people. Perhaps, following the lead of Britain's Labour Party, it needs to shrug off its most liberal elements and embrace truly centrist positions.

If they lose this November, Democrats may console themselves that a strong personality such as Hillary Clinton or John Edwards will rescue them in 2008. But they would be wise to conduct a far more thorough autopsy. After Mr. Dukakis's loss, the party turned to Bill Clinton in 1992, who campaigned as a "new Democrat" and won back the White House. But even running as a centrist, Mr. Clinton never won a majority of the popular vote. To win elections, especially in wartime, Democrats may actually have to change their spots.

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Mr. Crawford agrees that Mr. Kerry has shown the ability to come back from behind, as he did against Howard Dean this year and when he defeated the popular Gov. William Weld in 1996. Would Mr. Kerry have "come back from behind" this year if Dr. Dean hadn't both simultaneously imploded & exploded? I suspect Kerry's reputation as the Comeback Kid is overblown, as is his reputation as a "war hero" and, I now suspect, his reputed prowess as a debater.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Fri. 09/24/04 08:03:55 AM
Categorized as Democrats in Self-Destruct Mode.


   
   

"Channeling Howard Dean"

Democrats in Self-Destruct Mode CCCLXXXI

Spotted by the Chicago Tribune. (Ellipsis in original.)

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Last December, when Howard Dean was riding high among Democrats for his denunciation of the war in Iraq, another candidate for his party's presidential nomination attacked Dean as weak on foreign policy.

Speaking at Drake University in Des Moines, John Kerry blasted "those in my own party who threaten to take us down a road of confusion and retreat." In response to Dean's assertion that the capture of Iraq's dictator hadn't made America safer, Kerry said: "Those who doubted whether Iraq or the world would be better off without Saddam Hussein, and those who believe today that we are not safer with his capture, don't have the judgment to be president or the credibility to be elected president of the United States."

Kerry's aggressive defense of his own stand on Iraq came as no surprise: After his 2002 Senate vote to authorize the war, Kerry often characterized disarming Hussein as "the right decision." In May 2003, Kerry said on ABC that while he "would have preferred" more diplomacy before going to war, "I think it was the right decision to disarm Saddam Hussein. And when the president made the decision, I supported him, and I support the fact that we did disarm him."

As recently as last month, Kerry was sticking by that principle, stating that even if he had known the U.S. wouldn't find unconventional weapons in Iraq or prove close ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda, he still would have voted to authorize the war. But succeeding weeks have confronted Kerry with two harsh realities: His presidential candidacy has ebbed in public opinion polls, and Iraq has grown bloodier.

So it was bizarre, although not exactly shocking, to hear Kerry veer left during a speech on Monday: "We have traded a dictator for a chaos that has left America less secure..." he said. "Invading Iraq has created a crisis of historic proportions, and if we do not change course, there is a prospect of a war with no end in sight."

Kerry, who knows a few things about changing course, evidently believes he and his Senate colleagues were right to give President Bush the authority to wage war, but that Bush was wrong to use the authority. What's more, he suggested, under Bush, we may be losing that war.

Kerry gave little definition to the change of course he represents. He did, though, say: "We could begin to withdraw U.S. forces starting next summer and realistically aim to bring all our troops home within the next four years."

That's the kind of specificity that different listeners hear in different ways. Appreciative Americans might fairly conclude that Kerry wants to bring our boys and girls home. Other groups — nervous Iraqi citizens awaiting democracy, the vicious insurgents who plague them, and the coalition forces serving alongside U.S. troops — might fairly conclude that the Democrat who would be president is primarily interested in getting the heck out of Iraq ASAP.

Bush, too, says he wants to bring the troops home. But he is--as he has been for three years — steadfastly committed to defeating terrorists, challenging the governments that give them succor, and projecting democracy as broadly as possible in the Middle East as a step toward defanging Islamic fundamentalist terrorism.

Kerry, by contrast, speaks less ambitiously about fighting "our greatest enemy, Osama bin Laden and the terrorists." A logician devoted to this nation's long-range security — not just to making today's problems go away — might conclude that Kerry's goal is necessary but by no means sufficient.

Elections are approaching in both the U.S. and Iraq. Officials in both countries have said that terrorists could escalate their violence in order to break the will of Americans and Iraqis alike.

It will be interesting to see how Americans react to Kerry's bleak prognosis. One crucial task will be to make sure he doesn't come across as a prospective commander in chief who, having long defended his war authorization vote, now thinks insurgents have made the fight too tough.

Because, when he delivered that speech in Des Moines, Kerry also eviscerated Howard Dean for having been "all over the lot" on Iraq: "One moment he supported authorizing the use of force, the next he criticized those who did."

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The Blog from the Core asserts Fair Use for non-commercial, non-profit educational purposes.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Fri. 09/24/04 07:34:15 AM
Categorized as Democrats in Self-Destruct Mode.


   

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