Hewitt is blogging like the Energizer Bunny:
August 19, 2004
Posted at 8:30 PM, Pacific
Polipundit explains it all for you. Kerry should be way ahead at this point. He's not. In fact, his actions today --suddenly turning on the Vietnam vets he served with in frothing rage-- suggest his numbers are falling like a rock. The young lefty bloggers are in a snit: "This shouldn't matter! What I think matters ought to matter! How dare this matter!"
I remember the feeling well. Bush's DUI ought not to have mattered on the last weekend of 2000, but it did. That was a story about which Bush had never lied, had never traded on, but it mattered. The collapse of Kerry's narrrative about Vietnam does matter because Kerry made it matter. In fact, Kerry needed it to matter because a focus on his votes over 20 years in the United States Senate could not be sold to the American public, especially not during an economic expansion, and especially not during a war.
So now Kerry's sliding, and there is high dudgeon within the Kerry camp. Wait until the next phase, where Kerry's exclamations of pride in his service in Vietnam are put side-by-side with Kerry's Senate testimony of 30 years ago. I expect this will be considered bad form by the Kerry-boosters as well. Kerry was kid, they'll say, exaggerating his "war crimes" even as he exaggerated his Christmas-Eve-in-Cambodia in 1979, 1986, and 1992, and his CIA missions in 2003 and 2004. They will avoid the questions from the veterans of that war that Kerry slandered then who want honesty now. But it won't work. It is a video and an audio age, aided by the wonderful fact-checking of the internet. Kerry has been many different men. It bothers a lot of people for a lot of reasons. He won't win as a result. He won't come close. Sybil as president, we don't need.
Already the least mature among them are blaming the "right-wing smear machine." Heh. McCarthyism is back, but it is a farce this time, not a tragedy. The young scribblers without a day of real experience among them are certain of how the government works, how campaigns are run. They just know that The. Evil. Rove. is behind this meltdown. The older, wiser ones knew all along that Kerry was a pampered disaster, a stiff, a bore --a self-absorbed elitist; and they suspected he was hollow. Now Kerry's cocooning, refusing to hold a press conference, under the desk and hoping something will bail him out. Not the image of a leader in war-time. The nuttier types have blasted Bush for finishing his time with the kids on 9/11 before rising, taking his leave, and assuming command. Kerry can't handle bad press and tough questions. How would he handle an attack on New York and D.C.?
Kerry has had three terrible weeks, weeks from which I suspect there will be no recovering, though an occasional good week will interevene. Bush might have a bad debate, like Reagan did in '84. Pulses will race for a bit on the left. MoveOn.org will raise some more cash from exactly the sort of people you don't want running the country. And then the underlying trends will reassert themselves --despite Soros, despite the New York Times, despite Michael Moore. The economy is very good indeed. The enemy is very real. We need the grown-ups in charge, not the delusional.
"His conduct displayed many great inconsistencies and variations, not unnaturally, in accordance with the many and wonderful vicissitudes of his fortunes; but among the many strong passions of his real characher, the one most prevailing of all was his ambition and desire of superiority, which appears in several anectdotes told of his sayings whilst he was a child."
John Kerry is all about ambition, and does not appear to have shared much else with Plutarch's Alcibiades except this overwhelming need to be someone. This is an extremely unpleasant trait, one that has brought hundreds of brave men who serevd with him into open opposition to him. The effect of that opposition is devastating.
There are plenty of people among the elites who think that it should not be that way, who object to the collective judgment of the voters that it does matter. But there's no stopping the collective judgment. The voters have been watching. They know John Kerry came back from the Vietnam War and went in front of every camera that would have him to denounce the actions of the men he served with. Then they saw him in Boston claiming the honor of having served. Now they see his colleagues, a few at his side, but the vast majority denouncing him.
And they know, no matter what the details are, that isn't a man they want in charge.
They suspect that he will say anything, and sell anyone down the river, if it serves his ambition.
Against this candidate is George W. Bush, for whom there is genuine affection among half the people, and grudging admiration among a good deal more. And even among most of the rest a recognition that he is who he says he is. Not a Caesar, and not a Churchill. Just the right man at the right time. And that will be enough on 11/2.
A vote for W will be a vote for victory.
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