I have found that the most telling glimpses of the candidates have come when they were just beginning to step into the cauldron of ambition. This is the time when their lines were still unscripted and their public veneers hung loosely like a suit that they had not yet grown into.
Excellent piece. I'll have to take a close look at Shapiro's book when it comes out.
Now that the candidates are scripted...
boston.com
At final bend, a learning curve
By Peter S. Canellos, Globe Staff, 1/17/2004
DES MOINES -- John F. Kerry paced the front row of his audience, a microphone in his hand. He professed to see people of all ages, colors, religions, races. "Folks, you are John Ashcroft's worst nightmare," he exclaimed.
In fact, the audience was almost all white, but "Ashcroft" is now a potent applause line for every campaign in Iowa, as if the mere mention of the attorney general would send cats diving under the sofa.
Ashcroft is shorthand for the USA Patriot Act, which Kerry says the attorney general has "abused." But the senator himself voted for the USA Patriot Act -- and so did Senators John Edwards and Joseph I. Lieberman, and Representative Richard A. Gephardt, all of whom regularly decry the Bush administration as undercutting civil liberties.
In the waning days of the Iowa campaign, the candidates are sounding very much alike. Stump speeches, delivered six and seven times a day, can be exercises in trial and error. Candidates gauge the responses they get, like taste-testers evaluating brands of coffee, and eventually mold each speech into a crowd pleaser. Thus, the voters get to shape the platform, and the candidates oblige.
Kerry, for example, now attacks President Bush's decision to go to war in Iraq, under a resolution the senator supported. He laces into No Child Left Behind, an education plan the senator backed. And he vows to modify the effects of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which the senator helped enact.
Gephardt likes to point out that he voted against NAFTA and has been a consistent opponent, even when it was unfashionable. He makes this assertion just before launching into his own attack on the Patriot Act, which he supported, and then rumbling toward his final applause line. The only way to cure No Child Left Behind, he chortles, is to "Leave George Bush behind." And yes, Gephardt voted for the program.
Edwards, no doubt aware that Whitney Houston borrowed a song by Dolly Parton and turned it into one of the biggest hits of the '90s, admits to taking one of Gephardt's "great lines" about foreign policy: "George Bush doesn't play well with others."
He also credits the people of Iowa with showing him the flaws in No Child Left Behind. He seeks to elevate schools rather than stigmatize them. "That's the problem with what Bush has done," Edwards declares. Of course, Bush didn't do it alone; Edwards voted for the bill.
It's possible that Edwards, like Gephardt and Kerry, was educated by voters on these matters. To those supporting former governor Howard Dean of Vermont, it seems more like thievery.
Dean, however, is reacting like a child who's watched his brothers take his favorite toys: He's clamoring for attention, shooting rhetorical spitballs.
Voters don't seem to like that. Yesterday, he pulled an attack ad off the air. He seems to be experimenting with a little Edwards niceness.
Every candidate gets educated along the way, even the mavericks.
© Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company. |
