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| The Current Campaign: Mondo Bizzaro |
| 09.22.04 (4:03 pm) [edit] |
|
There I was, sitting in front of my HDTV, waiting for a football game to begin, when I saw something that almost made me fall out of my LazyBoy: In a promo for an upcoming show, there were John and Teresa Kerry sitting with Dr. Phil, talking about their marriage in new age language. “No,” I thought, “this isn’t real; this is just some political satire, designed to drive me crazy.” But it was real! John Kerry has been making the rounds of every “Regis and Kelly” type talk show lately, for one simple reason: John Kerry has a problem with women voters. The latest New York Times/CBS poll, taken in mid September, shows that women, the same voting bloc that favored Al Gore by 54-43%, now favor Bush over Kerry by 48-43%. That women are breaking in favor of a conservative war president over his progressive challenger is terrible news for the Kerry campaign. What is more dismaying to me, however, is that Kerry and his advisors have chosen an utterly counterproductive means of addressing this problem: Their plan is to “humanize” Kerry, to showcase his soft, warm side. Unfortunately, like so many other Kerry campaign gambits, this is exactly the wrong way to fix Kerry’s problem. In a time of global peril, paradoxically, women are not interested in a candidate playing up his “warmth”; they’re interested in his toughness, firmness, and national security assets. This is why the New York Times has dubbed former soccer moms “security moms” for the coming election. National security has superceded issues like education, health care, and abortion for them. Accordingly, if I were advising Kerry, I’d tell him to get his derriere off the silly talk shows, and spend more time talking to the Tim Russerts and Ted Koppels of the world. Women, no less than every other demographic group, want to see evidence of Kerry’s toughness and consistency, not evidence of how much he loves his wife. Moreover, Teresa Kerry is not a particularly winning figure with respect to the women’s vote. It is not surprising to me that campaign watchers have noticed a progressively declining role for Teresa recently. Teresa Heinz Kerry may eventually be a terrific first lady, but her quirkiness and impulsiveness have, to date, not been assets on the campaign trail. Whatever the outcome of the current campaign, I believe that historians will eventually see it as one of the most bizarre and incoherent presidential campaigns in history. Has there ever been a campaign where the incumbent’s incompetence at governing is surpassed only by the challenger’s incompetence at campaigning? What we are witnessing is the president from hell—Bush—against the candidate from hell—Kerry. For example, how bizarre is it that Kerry just told us for the first time in this long campaign season that we would be better off if Saddam had been left in power? While I wholeheartedly agree with this view, it is mind-boggling that Kerry apparently just came to this insight on September 21, 2004, one and a half years into the war. Indeed, during the Democratic primaries, Howard Dean took this exact position, arguing that the US was actually less safe since the overthrow of Saddam. Dean’s remark led Kerry to respond that anyone who believed that doesn’t, "have the judgment to be president." This is the kind of cringeworthy stuff that is maddening about Kerry. However, as the saying goes, better late than never: perhaps, at last, Kerry has found a position that he can stick with, and which will give him some rhetorical leverage. The whole issue of the vote to authorize the war and our relationship with Saddam has been a kind of Bermuda Triangle for Democratic candidates. You’ll recall that Wesley Clark, after playing footsies with the press for four months over whether he’d run, was asked on the first day of his presidential campaign, “Would you have voted for the Iraq War Resolution?” Amazingly, Clark couldn’t answer the question, first saying “yes,” then changing his mind and saying “no.” In doing so, he managed to sabotage his candidacy on its very first day. In a similar vein, John Kerry has been nothing but stumblebum on the issue of the war resolution. As a result, we all collectively hold our breath now whenever Kerry is asked to speak about his vote, because his responses are so unpredictable and erratic on this issue. There is a certain unholy symmetry to the Kerry and Bush teams respectively: Just as it is amazing that Bush’s senior foreign policy team, with its years of experience could be so inept in its prosecution of both war and diplomacy, it is just as astonishing that Kerry’s campaign team has produced a candidacy so lacking in clarity and consistency. From the time of the convention, Kerry’s campaign theme has been wrongheaded. There was no need at the Boston convention to play up for the world how “nice” and “upbeat” the Democrats were. This theme simply played into the already entrenched political stereotype that the Democrats are the “nice,” “softhearted” party, that is unfortunately too wussy to deal with the realpolitik of today’s world. The aforementioned television tour is the culmination of this ill-conceived “nice” strategy. On a more positive note, John Kerry has begun to show some fight over the last 10 days, bundling the many failures of the Bush administration into themes (“the excuse presidency”) that Kerry can address on the stump. No, Kerry has still not brought himself to utter the words “Abu Ghraib,” but he has shown progress. It is hard to understand why it took Kerry so long to find a passionate voice in his campaigning. It is now crucial that he stick with this voice; unless Kerry begins to demonstrate comfort with his own campaign persona, the electorate will not find a comfort level with him. It is dismaying to see Kerry going through the same growing pains as did Al Gore in 2000; as you’ll recall, there was a new Al Gore in every debate. For the final 41 days of the campaign, please let there be one consistent, tough, passionate John Kerry. |
| 3 Comments |
| Memo to Kerry: It’s the Coach, Stupid |
| 09.10.04 (8:26 pm) [edit] |
|
As the campaign enters its final two months, it is only fitting that this week marks the beginning of the football season—fitting, because it is football that offers John Kerry the key to defeating George Bush on November 2. Every football fan understands the truism that the personality of a team is a reflection of its coach. When a team is tough, consistent, smart, resourceful, and successful, it invariably means that the team has a coach with those attributes, which then percolate down through the team members. When a team is careless, underperforms, jumps offside, commits personal fouls, and generally fails in its purpose, it is equally certain that the team has a leader who lacks discipline, poise, focus, smarts, or more likely, all of the above. For a football coach and his team, personality is destiny. In other words, football teams are prime examples of the way that organizations display trickle-down competence--or incompetence--as the case may be. Never was this organizational model more apt than when applied to the Bush administration: Bush’s collection of recycled officials from previous administrations has more seasoning, more perspective, and more years of hands-on experience, than any administration in recent memory. Given this, one would assume that the personality of this group would be wise and adult: disciplined, competent, far-sighted, and stand-up in their responsibility-taking. It is all the more striking then, that the record of the Bush team is just the opposite: marked by false predictions, both economic and military, corruption, a penchant for deception and flim-flam, and the strategic use of ignorance as a defense when scandal rears up. My guess is that these Bush operatives are individually not as incompetent as they have shown over the last three years: Wolfowitz’s smug assurance that oil revenues would pay for the war; Rumsfeld’s disdain for the international community, not realizing the a year later, he would have to go begging those he had insulted; the most talented and adult member of the team, Colin Powell, permanently sullying his reputation for truth-telling and plain speech with his disgraceful and misleading presentation to the UN on WMD; and the worst offender, Dick Cheney, who has apparently joined the square earth society by continuing to prattle on, a year and a half into the occupation, about WMD and our military being “greeted as liberators.” The common denominator in all this incompetence, all this smoke, mirrors, and flimflam, is George W. Bush. The fact is, the President, who loves to joke about his conspicuous mediocrity and inattentiveness during college, has brought that same mediocrity to the presidency. Bush’s personal limitations have permeated his team, and have created an impenetrably low ceiling for its accomplishments. It is time that John Kerry began connecting the dots for the electorate, linking the policy failures of the Bush administration with the cloud of mediocrity that hovers over the president. Under Bush’s influence, his entire team has become a group of “C students.” Even as Hurricane Ivan is battering Jamaica, and eyeing the US east coast, a perfect storm is brewing for George W. Bush: 1) CBS has just defended and reconfirmed its memos which demonstrate skullduggery in the military career of Bush. [It is noteworthy that Bush has always carefully said that, “neither I nor my dad asked for special treatment.” The fact is, [url=http://www.cbsnews.com/storie...]Ben Barnes, Lt. Governor of Texas in 1968,[/url] says he was contacted by Sid Adger, a Texas oil man and friend of George Bush Sr., and asked if he could get George W in the Air Reserves.] 2) Kitty Kelley is about to release her tell-all book about the Bush family, which alleges among other things, that George W. was doing cocaine at Camp David during his father’s presidency. 3) The Abu Ghraib scandal is still growing, as we hear about stone-walling from the CIA, an increasing number of sites where abuse occurred, and tacit approval to mistreat detainees from the highest levels of the Pentagon. My contention is a simple one: The same undisciplined, inattentive, smirking individual who skipped through life by dint of good connections, is the same undisciplined man who has run both our economy and foreign policy into the ground. Kerry needs to start addressing the man, as much as the policies. One of Bush’s professors at Harvard Business School was Yoshihiro Tsurumi, now professor at the City University of New York. Listen to the comments that Professor Tsurumi made about George W. Bush, as reported in Japan Today Newspaper on July 3, 2004: "I always remember two groups of students. One is the really good students, not only intelligent, but with leadership qualities, courage. The other is the total opposite, unfortunately to which George belonged." "I asked him, 'What have you been doing? How about Vietnam?' and he said, 'Well, I've been in the National Guard in Texas.' I said, 'How did you get that? There's a 10-year waiting list.' And he said, 'Well, my dad has connections."' "In my class, he (Bush) declared that 'people are poor because they are lazy.' He was opposed to labor unions, social security, environmental protection, Medicare and public schools. To him, Franklin D Roosevelt's New Deal was 'socialism."' Now, I don’t expect John Kerry to tar George Bush with his academic performance of 35 years ago. I do, however, expect Kerry to make Bush’s incompetence a central thread of his campaign message. Each time I hear on the nightly news, “Kerry talked about health care today,” or, “Kerry spoke about jobs to his audience,” I feel a sense of disappointment because of the piecemeal nature of his approach. Kerry’s message should instead be far more comprehensive, tying together the multiple failures of the Bush team, and showing their common origin, George W. Bush. After all, the Bush team has managed to paint Kerry as a waffler, a flip-flopper, and a danger to national security. Bush’s personal shortcomings are a far richer mine to exploit. The biggest vulnerability of the Bush campaign isn’t the million jobs lost, or the half trillion budget deficit, or the sham war; rather, it is the half-baked, undisciplined, morally lax attitude that underlies all these failures. In other words, the major vulnerability of the Bush campaign is George W. Bush himself. Kerry should be seizing on this issue. In blog after blog, I have implored Kerry to raise the issue of Abu Ghraib, which stands as the clearest symbol of the differences in both competence and values between Kerry and Bush. Kerry believes that to promote democratic values around the globe, we need to scrupulously adhere to democratic values around the globe. Bush and Rumsefeld, however, have flirted with the position that in order to beat the bad guys, we have to emulate their tactics. Abu Ghraib was the bitter harvest sown by this wrongheaded view. To my continued dismay, the overly cautious Kerry continues to see this issue as too radioactive to touch. Two days ago, on September 8, [url=http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPT...]Jim Clancy, investigative reporter for CNN,[/url] raised significant issues that Kerry should be addressing in every stump speech. Clancy reports that Shareef Akeel, a Detroit lawyer who is representing Iraqi citizens in a class action suit, interviewed 150 individuals in Iraq and found something startling: they reported similar abusive treatment in prisons all over Iraq. Says Akeel: “The detainees that we spoke with were not just from Abu Ghraib. They were from the International Baghdad Airport. They were in Tikrit. They were in Mosul. They were in various detention centers and the abuse was not limited to just Abu Ghraib. It was expansive and pervasive.” Asked by Clancy what abuses he had uncovered, Akeel responded: "I mean, whatever the human mind can imagine, whatever sick acts you want to create, it seemed like it was an act without a limit… We basically hired a bunch of thugs who engaged in unspeakable acts and provided fruitless, I mean, just no information." As evidence of the wantonness and the pervasiveness of the torture, reporter Clancy bought an elderly woman on camera who “was herded and dragged from her home last winter and taken to one of Saddam Hussein's former palaces in Baghdad now used by the U.S. military. There she says she was told to look out to where her son was tied to a tree, bleeding and the clothes torn from being dragged on the ground. 'They told me to say goodbye to my son. That was a very painful moment for me because I realized the rest of my children were left alone in our apartment with the open doors and no one to protect them.’ This woman swears she had no information that could have been useful to the U.S. military. Despite that, she says, she was dragged on the ground until she passed out.” Clancy concludes his report with this eye-opener: “Statements reviewed by CNN show some of the victims say that after they were subjected to sexual abuse or humiliation they were never even asked any more questions, which brings us back full circle in the abuse story. Back to that fundamental question, then why?” The absence of any discussion of Abu Ghraib in Kerry’s campaign message is just as foolish as Al Gore’s disregard of Bill Clinton in 2000. Just as Gore didn’t trust his own campaign skills, and feared he’d be tainted by Monicagate if he invoked the Clinton name, so Kerry apparently feels that criticizing the Pentagon will weaken his image as a prospective commander in chief. Kerry is getting some foolish advice. The biggest lesson that Al Gore learned in 2000 is that you have to be yourself to be effective as a candidate. It is inconceivable that Kerry is not outraged by this scandal, yet on the stump, he continues to ignore it. Thus far, Kerry has left far too many arrows in his quiver. Without delay, Kerry needs to move beyond the one-issue-at-at-time stuff. He needs to start offering broader, tougher criticisms of the Bush team, detailing their failures in every department. And finally, he needs to place those failures where they belong, under the rubric of presidential leadership. It’s the coach, stupid! |
| 3 Comments |
I'm a psychologist in Washington, DC, and have a progressive outlook on today's political scene.
jeffrowan111@aol.com Jeff Rowan, Ph.D.