I can tell that Hugh Hewitt is excited. His daily production is going through the roof.
"'They have taken their eye off the real ball,' Mr. Kerry said, his voice almost shaking in anger. 'They took it off in Afghanistan and shifted it to Iraq. They took it off in North Korea and shifted it to Iraq. They took it off in Russia, and the nuclear materials there, and shifted it to Iraq.'"
John Kerry gave a 15-minute interview to the New York Times over the phone. No word on whether it was from an undisclosed location with word processing equipment. Note the "his voice almost shaking in anger" aside, underscoring that once again John Kerry has dsiplayed all the calm leadership of a crisis manager of superb qualifications. It is now 44 days since Kerry answered questions on camera from a major journalist --heh, Dan Rather certainly no longer counts, in fact, no one from CBS does-- and he's trying to substitute softball encounters with friendlies at the Times and Time Magazine for the real deal.
"Mr. Kerry argued that it was the Bush administration's refusal to follow Mr. Powell's advice in March 2001 and continue the Clinton administration's direct diplomacy with North Korea that created the conditions for the current crisis. Mr. Kerry has said for months that the United States must deal directly with the North Korean government - just as it dealt directly with Khrushchev during the Cuban missile crisis, and directly with China as it became a nuclear power in the 1960's."
Wow. John Kerry wants us to return to October of 2000, when Madeline Albright famously clinked glasses with the North Korean nut-bag, and December, 2000, when Bill Clinton contemplated a Munich-like dash to the Peninsula. Here's what Madame Secretary of State had to say to the madman even as his miserable people were tunneling deeper and deeper into mountains in which illegal nuke labs could be situated:
"There is a great distance between our two lands, but as we are starting to discover through our visits, distance is no barrier to closer ties. The United States understands that differences developed over many decades are real and cannot be eliminated overnight. We must be pragmatic and recognize that the road to fully normal relations remains uphill.
But America's symbol is the eagle, a bird that soars. And Korea's pride is its mountains, which scrape the sky. There is no obstacle we cannot overcome if we make the strategic decision to do so together."
Does America really want Madeline and her like-minded followers back in charge?
From Kerry's shakey comments to one reporter yesterday we can conlude that:
*he blames America for North Korea's lawlessness;
*he is afraid of the North Koreans;
*he would try and bribe North Korea;
*he doesn't believe that America can deal with multiple problems at once, but can only do so serially; and
*he wouldn't have invaded Iraq.
Look. This is just a plain call for appeasement, just like John Edwards' call for appeasement of Iran two weeks ago. Kerry, Edwards and their supporters hate that description, of course, but there's no denying it anymore than Red Riding Hood can call her cloak blue. Walks like a duck, sounds like a duck etc.
In Time, Kerry actually made me laugh:
"'When we get into those cold days of October and people's juices begin to flow and they measure us one to one, who's going to be stronger for America, I'm confident that my record of fighting for this country since I was a young man is going to eclipse the choices that have been disastrous that have been made by George Bush,' Kerry said."
Cue Lovitz. Yeah, that's the ticket. It will all be different in October, when "people's juices begin to flow." Has Mickey raised the white flag yet?
Calling a reporter on a Sunday while not appearing on the Sunday shows is an admission of both panic and certainty that the candidate couldn't have managed other than a controlled interview, and certainly not a television interview that would provide tape of a bumbler/stumbler still clutching his magic hat fantasy. What if Russert had rolled tape from StolenHonor? What is Chris Wallace had asked about the gun-running to Cambodia? The handlers can't risk letting Kerry out of the box he built for himself, so Campaign 2004 Deathwatch continues. How bad is it for the Dems? One report has a decision being taken to "unleash" Al Gore, which is like sending Jayson Blair to the aid of Dan Rather. Who's next? A reunion tour of Clark and Moore, with Howard Dean as an opening act?
Eventually the Dems will hit their lowest possible point in the polls, where news and flubs and fli-flops and isolation don't matter anymore because they have hit the floor and can't fall off the bedrock support of the couldn't-care-lessers and the never-look-ups. And then Kerry will tick up a couple of points and they will declare momentum. Watch for it. But don't be fooled by it. A candidate in the media bunker in mid-September is a candidate on his back.
Others down the ticket must be getting worried, like Tom Daschle, who is behind John Thune by 3% in the latest Rasmussen Report poll. Help Thune push further ahead with a contribution today of $25, $50, or $100. If you are feeling flush and wanting to wade into the campaign battle, here's my earlier post on the best use of $250. September sacrifices bring November celebrations.
Here's an excellent state-by-state analysis of the presidential campaign from the Washington Times, and here's Monday's ElectionProjection. But can their be any better omen of a fine fall ahead than the Browns crushing the Ravens?
As for the CBS meltdown, John Fund has a nice essay on the big blinders CBS is wearing, and kindly credits me as the unofficial historian of the blogosphere, a job no one could really do. It would be like being the historian of the Borg. The cumulative impact of the blogs on CBS/Rather credibility has reduced that fabled news organization to the status of whiner, and it cannot hope to combat the combination of its own shoddy reporting and the multiplying power of citizen journalism --open source journalism.
One example: Not long ago a young man in San Diego began a blog --Stones Cry Out, a nicely designed, solidly reported, center-right Evangelical blog. Here is author Rick Brady's Saturday post on CBS. Now, obviously, Brady isn't going to have the traffic of Powerline, INDC Journal, Instapundit etc, but he will have unique traffic --people going just to his site, because they know him, or found and like his blog, or were referred there by the Fraters gang (which is how I found him), and thus the CBS story spreads beyond its already established audience.
Technorati founder David Sifry explained the importance of this to me at the Democratic Convention in Boston, calling it the "power of the tail." Sure, a few hundred blogs seem to own a large share of the traffic, as N.Z.Bear's rankings by traffic shows. But there are tens of thousands of blogs each racking up unique visitors. If those blogs in the tail pick up a meme --say, "Dan Rather is a doddering fool and CBS is covering up for him"-- its spread across the universe of people using the web for information gathering is huge and almost instantaneous. And irreversible because a friend or colleague of Rick is much more likely to believe his analysis because he knows and trusts Rick than it is some knucklehead from CBS who is attempting to dismiss Rick as a pajama-wearing loon.
Here's a glimpse of the potential growth of the new medium of the blogosphere:
"It's estimated that during the last six months of 1921, half-a-million sets were sold, and this number had doubled by the middle of 1922 as the radio fad swept the nation. By early 1924, it was estimated by the Broadcasting Department of AT&T that there were more than 3.2 million receiving sets in use, although this is a very rough estimate considering the number of "home brew" receivers being constructed every day. More than half a million sets were believed to be in use in New York alone at the time of AT&T's survey. By contrast, the 1920 census pegged the US population at a bit over 106 million. So, there was quite a ways to go toward achieving full penetration.
But it was happening rapidly: RCA posted sales of $50 million during 1924 -- more than double its 1923 levels, and by the end of the year, the number of receivers in use had topped four million. Growth continued at similarly impressive rates thruout the twenties.
Skipping ahead to 1930, there were, according to figures compiled by "Radio Retailing" magazine, approximately 12,049,000 radio homes in the US at the time of that year's survey. Figuring a conservative average of 4 listeners per household, that makes the total radio audience at the turn of the decade around 48 million (1930 census figures peg total US population at approximately 138.4 million)
By 1935, the total radio homes stood at 22,869,000 -- and the audience thus increases to around 91.4 million. By 1940, the figures were 29.2 million radio homes for an audience of around 116 million. (In 1940, total population stands around 151 million.) 1945 shows figures of 34 million radio homes and 136 million listeners. And, by 1948, there were an even 40 million radio homes for 160 million listeners. At this point, one could say that radio had achieved its saturation point: just about every American had access to it."
The infrastructure of radio took a while to build, but then programming took over and attracted the audience. The web got built in the '90s, and now programming --and blogs are just web programming-- is taking over from old media that tried to make a home on the web but were far too static to supply the demand for instant news and analysis. So the pajama people took over, and Dan Rather is left shaking his fist in an opinion storm.
And John Kerry can't go on camera. Heh.
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