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The Weblog at The View from the Core - Fri. 09/17/04 08:44:14 PM
   
   

Jacoby & Chait

Democrats in Self-Destruct Mode CCCLXXVIII

"I don't care if John Kerry is a sack of cement.... We're going to carry him to victory."

One from the East Coast this week, another from the West.

First, Jeff Jacoby. (Italics in original.)

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Just for laughs, you want to hear a little joke about shooting the president?

Presidential assassination — now there's a funny topic. Just ask John Kerry. When the head of the United Mine Workers presented him with a semiautomatic shotgun during a Labor Day campaign stop in West Virginia, Kerry chortled, "I thank you for the gift, but I can't take it to the debate with me." High-larious!

How can you not love a candidate with such a robust sense of humor? The Massachusetts senator brings so much wit to the presidential race. Remember his wisecrack last spring about a bicycle accident that left President Bush with bruises on his face, hands, and knees? "Did the training wheels fall off?" he asked. Or his line in January about the man who is now his running mate? "When I came back from Vietnam in 1969," he said in Iowa, "I don't know if John Edwards was out of diapers then." Oh, that Kerry — what a stitch!

For some reason people are forever commenting on how dour and stiff Kerry is. But it's a bum rap. As anyone who has followed his career knows, the guy's a regular Jackie Mason.

Take his great quip about Saddam Hussein's military back in 1997, when he was advocating an expansion of the NATO no-fly zone. "The Iraqi Army is in such bad shape now," Kerry said, "even the Italians could kick their butts." Everyone split their sides, they were laughing so hard. Well, almost everyone. For some reason the Massachusetts state auditor, Joseph DeNucci, accused Kerry of a "degrading, disgusting" ethnic slur. And a spokesman for the National Italian American Foundation said, "It was a totally inappropriate comment. What could he have been thinking?" Talk about killjoys. There's no pleasing some people.

A year earlier, when Kerry was running for reelection, he uncorked a priceless rib-tickler about his opponent, Massachusetts Governor Bill Weld. "This guy," he said on Don Imus's radio show, "takes more vacations than the people on welfare." Is that a hoot? And yet, believe it or not, some people didn't think it was funny. "I'm very insulted, very insulted," one welfare recipient told The Boston Globe. She obviously has no appreciation for sophisticated comedy.

Speaking of sophisticated comedy, have you heard the one about the camel and the ass? This must be Kerry's favorite joke, to judge from the frequency with which he told it during last year's primary campaign. Here it is, taken verbatim from his remarks to the Florida Democratic party convention in December:

"A little more than 5,000 years ago, Moses said, `Hitch up your camel, lift up your shovel, mount your ass. I will lead you to the promised land.' Five thousand years later, Franklin Roosevelt said, `Light up a Camel, lay down your shovel, sit on your ass. This is the promised land.' Today, George Bush will outsource your camel, tax your shovel, kick your ass, and tell you there is no promised land."

No doubt there are some grouches who would regard this as excruciatingly unfunny, not to mention an insult to FDR. ("Lay down your shovel, sit on your ass" was not exactly the motto of the Works Progress Administration.) But as any connoisseur of good humor will attest, you can't hear jokes like this even in the best comedy clubs.

Not only is Kerry a very funny fellow, he is a critic of other people's material. He certainly let Bush have it for some dubious gags at the Radio and Television Correspondent's Dinner about the lack of chemical and biological weapons in Iraq. As Bush showed photographs of himself looking under furniture and behind the drapes in the Oval Office, he made comments like "Those weapons of mass destruction have to be somewhere" and "Nope, no weapons over there."

Apparently Bush never learned that some topics are not appropriate fodder for jokes, particularly from someone of national political stature. Kerry firmly set him straight.

"That's supposed to be funny?" Kerry asked. "If George Bush thinks his deceptive rationale for going to war is a laughing matter, then he's even more out of touch than we thought. Unfortunately for the President, this is not a joke." Thank Heaven at least one of the candidates for president knows that certain subjects are too grim to make light of.

Anyway, to get back to Kerry's jest about shooting the president: This isn't a new theme for him. Shortly after the November 1988 presidential election, he made headlines with a similar knee-slapper about incoming Vice President Dan Quayle.

"The Secret Service is under orders," Kerry told a business audience in Lynn, "that if Bush is shot, to shoot Quayle."

And to think that some people don't find him funny.

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Now, Jonathan Chait.

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If John Kerry loses the election, and quite possibly even if he wins, the main thing people will remember about his campaign is how utterly bizarre it was that a major party nomination could have been captured by a man so staggeringly devoid of political talent.

The first job of a candidate is to win the election, a task to which Kerry seems spectacularly ill suited. This is not to say he won't beat President Bush, only that Kerry's contribution to a potential Kerry victory would be similar to the anchor's contribution to an America's Cup championship. Lest you think I'm exaggerating, some of Kerry's strongest supporters have explicitly likened him to ballast.

"I don't care if John Kerry is a sack of cement," former Texas Agricultural Commissioner Jim Hightower said in June. "We're going to carry him to victory."

At his very best, Kerry is capable of adequately delivering a prepared speech. But when speaking off the cuff, he has an inexplicable penchant to play into his opponents' hands. Bush implies (outrageously) that Kerry wants to go soft on terrorists? Kerry responds that he wants a "more sensitive war on terror." Bush portrays Kerry as an out-of-touch, Francophile elitist? Kerry tells GQ, "I love sports. French skiers." Bush paints Kerry as indecisive? Kerry volunteers that at restaurants, "You know when they give you the menu, I'm always struggling, what do you want?" It's as if he has somehow internalized his opponents' attacks upon him.

Nor can Kerry articulate his policies. Earlier this summer I listened as a friendly questioner at a Missouri event asked Kerry to describe his healthcare plan — not a trick question. He proceeded to blather on for some 10 minutes, in increasingly abstract terms, to the point where I had no idea what he was talking about. And I've written about healthcare and understand his plan, or at least I thought I did before he started explaining it.

If Kerry does not stage a comeback (and he well might — I lend great credence to the cement sack strategy), the natural next step is for people to rationalize his failure. If he can't run a campaign, the argument goes, he would never have been able to run the White House.

That sounds reasonable enough unless you consider the fact that George W. Bush is a highly competent campaigner but a flaming disaster of a president. And it is exactly those things that make him so ruthlessly effective on the stump — centralized authority, Comintern-like party discipline, total disregard for the truth — that have created a hermetically sealed petri dish in which bad policies come to life and are carried out unchallenged.

Bush's staffers, unlike Kerry's, don't leak despairing quotes to the press when their candidate drops in the polls. But they don't seem to raise questions behind closed doors either. When Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill suggested in late 2003 that maybe this deficit thing was sort of, you know, a problem, he was fired.

The apotheosis of the administration's rewarding of loyalty over competence came when it essentially turned Iraq over to the College Republicans. (No, seriously. The White House solicited staff for the Coalition Provisional Authority from a list of entry-level applicants at the Heritage Foundation.)

Having everybody do what Karl Rove says or they'll never work in this town again works a lot more smoothly than having a bunch of smart people with different points of view try to hash things out over pizza at 3 a.m., but it doesn't necessarily lead to the wisest policy decisions.

If you drew a schematic map of Kerry's campaign staff, it would resemble Afghanistan, with chieftains warring over patches of turf and little central authority to rein them in.

Could a president function this way? Actually, yes. In 1993, the Clinton White House was riven by internal strife as it tried to put together an economic program. When Bob Woodward luridly chronicled the backbiting, pundits tut-tutted about the disarray. But the policies they came up with worked pretty well.

The difference between Kerry and Bill Clinton is that the latter could easily explain his policies to the public. But a president who struggles to enact decent policies is surely better than one who easily enacts awful policies. And though Kerry's ineptitude makes a victory less likely, it also would make it all the sweeter for those itching to see the current administration convincingly repudiated. I could tell Republicans: You know how bad Bush's record was? He lost his reelection campaign to that guy.

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I guess Jon Chait's (as in "chaitred") new LAT column provides a clue what kind of direction their new editorial-page editor Michael Kinsley is taking.

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Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Fri. 09/17/04 08:44:14 PM
Categorized as Democrats in Self-Destruct Mode.

   

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