Tenchusatsu, RE: So what does Kerry do? Try and have it both ways."
Unrelated to your article, but a general comment about people like Kerry that have an ability to see the various facets or what I'll call the shades of grey on a position.
People that see grey shades, tend to give the appearances of seeing it both ways. In some cases this isn't good. But in many cases it's beneficial - especially with international politics, where the ability to step into the other person's shoes is so critically important.
Yes, politicians from both parties are overly political, extremely so.
But be careful to separate out when a grey person is being political vs when he or she is simply demonstrating an ability to see all sides (not both sides, not 2 sides, but all facets, n-sides) of a situation (which allows the ability to hold what might appear to others to be opposite positions but it's not due to an ability to see the subtle shades of grey of various positions.) The more complex a person is, and maybe less decisive, they are more apt to see many facets to a position - not just two sides. While concrete people are more granular, and they have the useful ability to distill complex things into black and white, this or that, but maybe are divisive when decisive. Neither types of people are bad - all types are needed for the different problems out there. I have one brother that sees all shades of gray, he's great at preventative medicine (early cardio diagnostics, more like Kerry), while my other brother is black and white (more like Bush) and he's great at emergency medical decisions where quick action is needed and he doesn't get overwhelmed by the subtle complex data that comes forward because he distills things into black and white decisions. But for preventative medicine, my other brother has an uncanny ability to see the subtle things so much earlier which is incredibly important before it becomes a crisis. At the risk of overly generalizing, the preventative type can avoid emergencies, while the b/w action taker might be better in a crisis. This is why I think that if there is a bin Laden attack before the election, Bush probably gets the White House, otherwise Kerry will get it. (I prefer Kerry in either situation.)
In your example, I haven't bothered to go back and analyze his position, so this post doesn't pertain to that particular issue. He might be political here. Or he could be seeing shades of grey. I haven't read it so don't know.
My post is just a general comment about how people that see shades of grey sometimes may come across as less than genuine to others that are more concrete and decisive, because it's possible the concrete folks don't see why others can see the various subtle positions - which to others might give the appearances to be political or conflicting - but isn't.
On another note, when the media was attacking Bush last week for the terrorist alerts, Kerry made a statement and said these are serious alerts. He could have politicalized it to his favor, but he didn't. The trick is to figure out when a shades of grey conceptual person is being political or not. Same applies to concrete people like Bush though too.
The closer one is to either one of their personality types, the more that person is able to understand and discern them. Differences in personality types probably explains to a certain degree why certain people trust Bush more, while certain other people trust Kerry more.
Regards,
Amy J |
