My Man

Images of my candidate keep me up at night: The droning, turgid voice. He's begun to do this old man thing with his tongue, kind of foppishly licking his muscle-less lips every few seconds or so. I got so worried I called my good friend Paul Bunyan. This is what he told me:

How lame is Kerry really? There are 2 sides to this. The real question is what Kerry would actually do if elected, but first we have to deal with Kerry as a candidate, and the question of how much of a Gore/Dukakis passive temporizing Asperger's syndrome dweeb he is. The indications so far are not good. It is very confusing to me that he can make the same mistakes as Gore just 4 years later. I guess it's an instinct to lie about little things that is ingrained and uncontrollable. A few months ago he was skiing and reporters saw him fall on the slopes (a secret service guy had blundered into his path). When a nytimes reporter asked him about it, he snapped "I don't fall down." According to the reporter, he then "used an expletive to describe the agent who 'knocked me over.'"The reporter crafted a brutally contemptuous profile of Kerry around this quote, a real assassination job. Here's how it begins:
"John Kerry was in the air, approaching the Continental Divide, and the candidate often ridiculed as straddling both sides of political divides was wrestling with the big matter at hand.
Should he ski, or snowboard? Or maybe both? He gave no clue where he stood. But that was Wednesday night.
A longtime adviser recently suggested that there were two John Kerrys: "indoor John and outdoor John" -- one who agonizes over decisions, and another who acts boldly on them.
It was outdoor John, decidedly so, who emerged from an armored S.U.V. at the foot of Bald Mountain here on Thursday morning, outfitted in blue ski gear and swigging from a bottle of vitamin-fortified water. From the rear of the vehicle he pulled a weathered old snowboard, and for most of the day proceeded to zigzag down what locals affectionately call Mount Baldy." (nytimes 3-19-04)
The guy is being mocked for having a car, for drinking water, and for being able to both snowboard and ski, and the entire piece is like that, going on to mix in a few mentions of his supposedly embarassing flip-flops on policy along with the gratuitous ridicule. The question is how much of this is Kerry's fault, or to put it another way--is there anybody as good or better than he (president-wise) who would fare any better (candidate-wise)? If he really did profanely insult the bodyguard, then he really is autistic and it's going to catch up with him this summer in some hideous way, but the incident is uncorroborated and comes from a reporter who clearly holds a venomous hatred for him, so I'm suspending belief on that. But it doesn't really matter what exactly happened because, either way, Kerry has somehow managed to make one of the key campaign reporters loathe him on a visceral level. Inspiring the hatred of reporters is exactly what Gore did, while Bush seduced them like Phineas the cool boarding school jock (A Separate Peace reference). Most reporters hated Bush's ideas, but it was easy for them to forget about that because he never talked--or probably even thought--about anything of substance. He was just was fun, while Gore was a bore and a scold. Clinton was (almost) as much of a hairsplitting, risk-averse, fence-straddler as Gore and Kerry, but he dazzled the press corps, and got away with it. Now of course Bush has the press corps trained like dogs. There was a question today in his minute and a half "press conference" after his testimony before the 9/11 commission that went in effect like this: "Mr. President, some of your critics--and I know they are desperate and insane--have suggested that you have insisted on giving your testimony in concert with Mr. Cheney in order to--forgive me Mr. President--in order to "get your stories straight," and also because, as these obviously crazy people might say, you are incapable of answering the commission's questions without his assisstance. Please forgive me for I only ask this question to give you an opportunity to put an end to this treasonous madness." (find a transcript and I think you will find my paraphrase captures the basic character of the question.) Bush's answer was something to see--he never even remotely adressed the question (by the way, how can somebody who only speaks in scripted talking points spend so much time fumbling for words?). There was no follow-up (to see a follow-up question from the press, try the BBC or, in this country, travel backward in time). But Jesus Christ, couldn't Kerry grab some press by saying something or other? People like us have been saying this a lot lately. And it's pretty much inexplicable because there's so much to say. Four years ago we were complaining in the same way about Gore, but it was kind of abstraction--say something, anything, please. But right now the stuff to talk about is sitting right there staring everybody in the world in the face, a mountain of lies, failure, and corruption. Bush lied about the WMD (and that's why I, Kerry, voted for the war authorization). He is lying about being focussed on terrorism prior to 9-11-01, and in fact ramped down Clinton's anti-terror protocols. He was on vacation while Osama's people planned the attacks, and ignored all warnings in August '01. He threw out all the people trying to plan for post-war Iraq, and what is happening there now is a direct consequence of his ideological blindness and incompetence. He lied about a thousand small things from the Baghdad thanksgiving turkey, to the "mission accomplished" backdrop, to the fake Christmas poem. Plus the Halliburton and Enron scandals, the Hitlerian madness of Guantanomo bay and the Yee debacle, theft from the 9/11 fund, rolling over on Pakistan and N. Korean nukes, and getting played by the Saudis. Sorry for reiterating this stuff, so I won't mention the environmental policy giveaways to the enregy companies and Total Information Awareness. How can Kerry give a speech, anywhere at any time that doesn't include the phrase Total Information Awareness? I mean they gave this stuff to him.Okay, whatever, let's say he gets elected, which stilll could happen despite his best efforts because the sock monkey president is not Reagan, he really is an uncomfortable and idiotic figure.Well, I think people get their hopes too high. Was Adlai Stevenson or Eugene McCarthy or McGovern or Ralph Nader ever president? What do you want from a president? What are you angry about that Clinton signed while dealing with republican majorities?All I want is a president who is not an insane person. Is that too much to ask? I really don't care that much about politics--except when Hitler tries to come to power, which is what is happening now. There is nothing cynical about "anybody but Bush." This isn't some kind of sell-out or lack of principle. We want to just get back to normal, where an arrested person has right to council and to state his case--unlike that poor bastard Padilla--and America doesn't start "preemptive" wars.I don't care if Kerry is FDR or LBJ or WJC or something lesser. He won't be able to do anything anyway, given that at least the house will be against him. We just need a president who is not thinking about some confused vision of the 1000-year Reich combined with the Rapture so that we can go back to doing whatever it is we do.