Pure Gold!
BEST OF THE WEB
BY JAMES TARANTO
Tuesday, September 7, 2004 3:17 p.m.
It's 2002 Again
You know, if John Kerry weren't so darn electable, the Democrats would be panicking right now. Oh wait, he isn't and they are. Ever since the Iowa caucuses in January, two assumptions had guided the party: that its loathing of President Bush is shared by the country, and that John Kerry's Vietnam service is a huge political asset. It now seems clear that the headlines on Nov. 3 will not read "War Hero Wins by Default." Had the Dems ventured outside the liberal media echo chamber to read this column, they'd have seen this coming months ago. But hey, you can lead a donkey to water . . .
Anyway, Democrats appear to be divided over what to do now. Let's start by looking at the most sober advice, some of which the New York Times outlines in a Sunday piece:
Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana said Mr. Kerry had spent too much time talking about national security, including his own views on the Iraq war, and overplayed Mr. Kerry's Vietnam war experience, inviting the attacks that have dominated debate in recent weeks.
The focus on security was calculated to erase Mr. Bush's advantage on the issue. But Democratic leaders said the Kerry campaign had become ensnared in a debate that played to Mr. Bush's strength, and diverted him from challenging Mr. Bush on his domestic record.
"He needs to define this election," Mr. Bayh said of Mr. Kerry. "So much of the convention was focused on national security--if that's where the election is, I don't think he can win."
The last Democrat to win the White House seems to agree, according to a Monday Times report:
Former President Bill Clinton, in a 90-minute telephone conversation from his hospital room, offered John Kerry detailed advice on Saturday night on how to reinvigorate his candidacy, as Mr. Kerry enlisted more Clinton advisers to help shape his strategy and message for the remainder of the campaign.
In an expansive conversation, Mr. Clinton . . . told Mr. Kerry that he should move away from talking about Vietnam, which had been the central theme of his candidacy, and focus instead on drawing contrasts with President Bush on job creation and health care policies, officials with knowledge of the conversation said.
Ignore national security, avoid Vietnam, concentrate on domestic issues--well, it did work for Clinton. But a 1992 strategy makes no sense in 2004. There are many differences between the two elections, but the most salient is that today we are at war. A candidate who has nothing to say about national security cannot expect to win the White House during wartime.
Bayh and Clinton are savvy enough to know that the strategy they are recommending for Kerry is a losing one. But it may be the least losing strategy possible for the Democratic Party. To see why, forget 1992 and look back just two years, to the election of 2002.
As we've observed before, between Sept. 11, 2001, and Election Day 2002, the Democrats mostly kept their foreign-policy differences with the Bush administration within the bounds of reason. Since the party out of power in the White House usually gains congressional seats in off-year elections, they figured they would maintain and extend their slender majority in the Senate.
Instead the GOP picked up enough seats to give it a bare majority. The Dems' failure to hold their Senate redoubt, more than anything else, was what unleashed the Angry Left. One could argue, however, that the 2002 strategy was a failure only when measured against the Dems' unrealistically high expectations, and even then largely because they departed from it in two key races.
The Democrats' net Senate loss was only two seats; this was nothing like the drubbing they took in 1994 or even the one the GOP endured in 2000. If those two seats had not swung the majority, the results would have been wholly unremarkable. The Dems managed to knock off a Republican incumbent, in Arkansas, and to hold off tough challenges to their own incumbents in Louisiana and South Dakota. One Democratic incumbent who lost, Jean Carnahan of Missouri, was a weak candidate, an appointee who had never even run for office before.
The other two Republican pickups were in states where the Democrats deviated from their strategy of accommodation. In Georgia, the great patriot Max Cleland went down to defeat because his pro-union vote against the Homeland Security Department favored a Democratic interest group over the defense of America. In Minnesota, last-minute substitute candidate Walter Mondale suffered when a memorial service for Sen. Paul Wellstone degenerated into a freakish Angry Left pep rally. As we noted at the time, in both Georgia and Minnesota the GOP also picked up the governorship, won contested House races and made gains in the state legislature, which suggests that liberal anger and softness on defense are dangerous to every Democrat on the ballot.
There are eight key Senate races this November, all in states President Bush carried in 2000: Alaska, Colorado, Florida, Louisiana, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina and South Dakota. To take a Senate majority, Democrats would have to win seven of these races. Republicans need only four to increase their majority, and a GOP sweep would give the party a 56-44 edge in the Senate.
On Nov. 2, John Kerry will be atop the Democratic ticket in all 50 states. In his Rocky Horror speech last Thursday night, Kerry presented himself to the nation as a bitter weakling who can't abide criticism and who takes his foreign-policy cues from Michael Moore. That is political poison. Could it be that Bayh and Clinton have written off Kerry's chances of winning the presidency and are urging him instead to follow a path that will allow him to lose with dignity, so as to minimize their party's down-ballot losses?
Dems Against Dignity
One Democrat who hopes John Kerry doesn't lose with dignity is Susan Estrich, the commentator who served as a consultant for Michael Dukakis's 1988 campaign. Estrich is furious about the success the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth have had in raising questions about Kerry's character, and she urges Democrats to retaliate:
The trouble with Democrats, traditionally, is that we're not mean enough. . . . That is the conclusion Democrats have reached. So watch out. Millions of dollars will be on the table. And there are plenty of choices for what to spend it on. . . .
Will it be the three, or is it four or five, drunken driving arrests that Bush and Cheney, the two most powerful men in the world, managed to rack up? (Bush's Texas record has been sealed. Now why would that be? Who seals a perfect driving record?)
After Vietnam, nothing is ancient history, and Cheney is still drinking. What their records suggest is not only a serious problem with alcoholism, which Bush but not Cheney has acknowledged, but also an even more serious problem of judgment. Could Dick Cheney get a license to drive a school bus with his record of drunken driving? (I can see the ad now.) A job at a nuclear power plant? Is any alcoholic ever really cured? So why put him in the most stressful job in the world, with a war going south, a thousand Americans already dead and control of weapons capable of destroying the world at his fingertips.
She goes on in this vein, suggesting that Democrats campaign on Bush's National Guard service (which she bizarrely equates to dodging the draft) and on "questions about whether the president has practiced what he preaches on the issue of abortion," whatever that means.
Well now! Far be it from us to get all high-mindedly horrified about the prospect of a campaign not based on "the issues." And there's something to be said for the drama of a truly vicious campaign, as against the strongerathomerespectedintheworld pap of the Democratic Convention or the petulant whining of the postconvention Kerry.
But dwelling on minor allegations of wrongdoing in the far-off past seems unlikely to bring down an incumbent president. Suppose you're an employer and you hear that one of your employees, who's been working for you for about four years, once had a drinking problem and in fact pleaded guilty nearly 30 years ago to a misdemeanor charge of driving under the influence. You actually heard about all this when you initially hired him, and it did give you second thoughts, but in the end you decided to give him a chance. In the four years he's been working for you, you've seen no sign that he's fallen off the wagon. Is there any cause here to fire him? Even if the revelation about his past were new, wouldn't it have to be pretty severe to constitute grounds for termination?
Now say someone comes to you looking for a job. Right off the bat, you notice something strange about his résumé: It goes on for page after page about a job he held for four months, more than 35 years ago, but makes only the barest mention of anything he's done since. You have him in for an interview, and he can't give you a straight answer to any question about what he plans to do in the job if you hire him. Instead (to borrow a description from Joe Conason), he sounds like a bar-stool bore, with a bad habit of repeating the same lame boasts about that long-ago four-month stint again and again.
Still, you decide to check out his references. (John Edwards: "If you have any question about what John Kerry is made of, just spend three minutes with the men who served with him.") Some sing his praises quite extravagantly, but a greater number describe him harshly as a man of dubious character, and some accuse him of lying on his résumé. He acknowledges a few embellishments but refuses to provide you with documents that would shed light on the other accusations.
Would you hire this man? And would you fire an employee of four years' standing in order to create an opening for him?
Fighter Pilots Are Sissies, Says Theater Critic
"Only in an election year ruled by fiction could a sissy who used Daddy's connections to escape Vietnam turn an actual war hero into a girlie-man," writes Frank Rich in the "Arts" (!) section of the New York Times.
So Frank Rich thinks George W. Bush is a sissy because he flew fighter jets in his youth. And what did Frank Rich do when he was younger? Why, he was a theater critic!
Not that there's anything wrong with that!
Kerry Shoots Off His Mouth
In November 1994, then-Sen. Jesse Helms remarked in a newspaper interview that President Clinton was unpopular on North Carolina military bases and that the president "better watch out if he comes down here. He'd better have a bodyguard." A Secret Service spokesman publicly expressed concern, and Sen. Tom Harkin, an Iowa Democrat, said, "It does seem almost like a veiled threat." Helms was forced to apologize, and rightly so. Assassinating the president is something you don't joke about.
So let's see how long it takes for John Kerry to apologize for this remark, reported by the Associated Press:
In West Virginia, Cecil Roberts, president of the United Mine Workers of America, gave Kerry a rifle as a gift. Kerry, a self-described gun-owner and hunter, quipped: "I thank you for the gift, but I can't take it to the debate with me."
(Drudge reports the firearm is actually a shotgun, not a rifle, and that last year Kerry sponsored legislation that would have banned it.)
On a lighter note, the AP also reports that Kerry has resorted to making fun of the president's middle initial:
"The 'W' stands for wrong," Kerry said of Bush's middle initial. "Wrong choices, wrong judgment, wrong priorities, wrong direction for our country."
Wow, there's a compelling argument. Of course, turnabout is fair play. Maybe Dick Cheney could adopt a similar slogan: "The 'F' stands for . . ." Ah, never mind.
Then Again, He May Not
"Cheney May Help or Hinder Bush's Chances"--headline, Associated Press, Sept. 7
By the Way . . .
Some jokes never get old. It just cracks us up every time we read something like this, from yesterday's Boston Globe:
Kerry hyped his Vietnam service at the kickoff [of his primary campaign], asking his former crewmates to join him on stage. But campaign aides were frustrated when the media did not embrace the war hero storyline and focused instead on the race with then-front-runner Howard Dean. As Dean gained momentum, Kerry's advisers publicly shrugged off the polls, but one statistic stunned some of them.
"A staggering amount of people still didn't know that John was a Vietnam veteran--it was extraordinary," McKean said. "We felt like John's story wasn't breaking through, and it was a critical part of who he was and a critical part of the campaign."
Part of the problem was the candidate. Kerry rarely opened up about Vietnam, leaving the glory for his crewmates to share. But he concentrated on overcoming his own Brahmin-bred modesty, advisers said, talking more than ever about how he had "bled for his country" and killed Viet Cong.
Well, at least now everyone knows. The Globe story ends with a quote from Douglas Brinkley, author of the Kerry-friendly biography "Tour of Duty": "Kerry decided to make Vietnam the centerpiece of his campaign for one clear reason: Imagine him without his military record--he would just be another liberal from Taxachusetts." To which one might add: with a marginally better chance of winning.
Bush Takes Lead in Vermont
An update on the AOL straw poll, which we noted Friday: President Bush has now taken the lead in Vermont. At this writing the president is up in the Green Mountain State, 230 votes to 227; his nationwide lead is 65% to 34%. With Bush carrying all 50 states, he would beat John Kerry, 535 electoral votes to 3, if this were an actual election. If Colorado passes its screwy "reform" initiative, Bush's lead narrows to 532-6.
Reader Marc Rosaaen doesn't trust this survey:
AOL's straw poll is really, really unscientific, because it shows Bush beating Kerry in Massachusetts. I fearlessly predict Kerry will win Massachusetts.
Yeah, well, don't get cocky. Meanwhile, the much-awaited Gallup Labor Day poll is out, and it shows the president leading the haughty, French-looking Massachusetts Democrat, who by the way served in Vietnam, 52% to 45% among likely voters.
This Just In
"Bush and Kerry Differ on State of Economy"--headline, Associated Press, Sept. 4
She Should Read Her Husband's Lips
"Bush Mum on Need for Tax Increases"--headline, Toronto Star, Sept. 4
Al Qaeda, Peasants With Pitchforks?
In December 2002, we coined the phrase vicarious terrorism to describe people--in that case it was George McGovern--who ascribe their own political views to al Qaeda and then argue that the Osama bin Laden & Co. would be appeased if only America adopted those views as policy.
Now it's Pat Buchanan's turn. From an exchange with Tim Russert on "Meet the Press" Sunday (crosstalk deleted):
Russert: You have written something in your book that I think is going to be quite controversial and I want to put it on the screen and share it with you and our viewers and give a chance for our group to respond to it:
"U.S. dominance of the Middle East is not the corrective to terror. It is a cause of terror. Were we not over there, the 9/11 terrorists would not have been over here. And while their acts were murderous and despicable, behind their atrocities lay a political motive. We were attacked because of our imperial presence on the sacred soil of the land of Mecca and Medina, because of our enemies' perception that we were strangling the Iraqi people with sanctions and preparing to attack a second time, and because of our uncritical support of the Likud regime of Ariel Sharon" in Israel.
Are you suggesting that our alliance with Israel is one of the reasons that we were attacked on September 11?
Buchanan: Sure. That's one of the reasons given by Osama bin Laden. In his fatwa of 1998, he wrote that there are three causes of the problems and three causes for a declaration of war by all Arabs and good Muslims against the United States. One, America's imperial presence on the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia. Secondly, the sanctions policy against Iraq which was persecuting and basically starving, he said, the Iraqi people, and we were planning another invasion. Third is the United States' uncritical support of the Ariel Sharon regime in Israel, which he argued is persecuting the Palestinian people.
It's worth noting in passing that Buchanan/bin Laden's first two complaints, the U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia and the sanctions against Iraq, were both obviated by the Iraq war, which Buchanan (and presumably bin Laden) opposed.
But Buchanan's calumny against Israel--which has a long history, going back at least to the days before the original Gulf War, in 1990--is worth dwelling on. Bin Laden, he claims, opposes "the Likud regime of Ariel Sharon." Sharon was elected prime minister of Israel in 2001, three years after the fatwa that, according to Buchanan, condemned his "regime."
True, Likud was in power (under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu) in 1998, but Labor's Ehud Barak won election in 1999, and that didn't stop al Qaeda from attacking the USS Cole in October 2000, even as President Clinton was struggling to broker an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal.
Al Qaeda's first attacks on American targets were in Yemen in 1992 and at the World Trade Center in 1993--at a time when Labor's Yitzchak Rabin was Israel's prime minister. Rabin later reached an accommodation with Arafat, who won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1994. Bin Laden does not appear to have been appeased.
Attacks on Ariel Sharon and Likud often mask hostility toward Israel, or toward Jews in general. By falsely attributing his own "anti-Sharon" views to bin Laden, Buchanan seems to be suggesting that the al Qaeda leader is no more anti-Semitic than he himself is. Think about what that implies.
(Carol Muller helps compile Best of the Web Today. Thanks to Steven Stratton, Jerome Marcus, Brent Silver, Samuel Walker, Edward Schulze, Paul Hurley, Adam Muntner, Frank Nelowet, Brendan Vaughn, Michael Segal, Al Dubinsky, Ethel Fenig, Michael Zukerman, Steve Roberts, John Williamson, David Hammond, Baruch Brodersen, Bruce Goldman, John Podhoretz, Julie Carlson, Nick Uva, Aryeh Bak, Jerry Skurnik, Michael Siegel, Norm Dean, Robert Shull, Dori Monson, Nate Wagner, Michael Dowding, Nechama Cox, Charlie Gaylord, Robert Paci, Liz Gasper, Ed Miseta, Mickey Morgan, Jim Fraivillig, Joel Goldberg, David Beebe and Bernard Levine. If you have a tip, write us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)
Today on OpinionJournal:
Review & Outlook: The unique depravity of modern Islamic terror.
Brendan Miniter: John Kerry will be lucky to exceed Michael Dukakis's share of the popular vote.
Mark Yost: A war hero speaks out against the military and finds himself in court combat.
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