Best of the Web Today - March 8, 2004
By JAMES TARANTO
No Nuance Is Good News?
Is John Kerry a dithering opportunist, or is he just "nuanced"? "Kerry's supporters say his approach is nuanced and thorough, better for tackling complicated issues such as the economy and the war on terrorism," reports the Washington Post. "Far from paralyzing, they say, it is what makes his argument compelling":
"George Bush is, 'I know what's right, and I know what's wrong,' regardless of the nature of reality," said Jonathan Winer, Kerry's counsel from 1983 to 1994. "John takes the opposite approach: 'Don't assume you know where I am. Don't assume I know what I think. We'll talk it through.' It's a deliberate suspension."
Kerry is a man who studies the menu at restaurants, even when he knows what he's going to order. Entering a room, he pauses and looks around, as if to weigh his options. He is so fond of the phrase "tough choices" that Senate staffers routinely inserted it in his speeches because they knew he would say it anyway.
The Post article follows by a day a New York Times report on the same subject:
Some aides and close associates say Mr. Kerry's fluidity is the mark of an intellectual who grasps the subtleties of issues, inhabits their nuances and revels in the deliberative process. They call him a free-thinker who defies stereotypes. Others close to him say his often-public agonizing--over whether to opt out of the system of spending caps and matching money in this campaign, or whether to run against Al Gore in 2000--can be exasperating.
Fittingly enough, you can count among those who are exasperated by John Kerry's nuance . . . John Kerry. From an interview with Time magazine:
"I don't think war is nuanced at all. I think how you take a nation to war is the most fundamental decision a President makes," Kerry says, "and there's nothing nuanced at all about keeping your promises. There is nothing nuanced about exhausting remedies that give you legitimacy and consent to go to war. And I refuse ever to accept the notion that anything I've suggested with respect to Iraq was nuanced. It was clear. It was precise. . . ."
Well, let's roll the tape and recall what Kerry said in September:
The vote is the vote. I voted to authorize. It was the right vote, and the reason I mentioned the threat is that we gave the--we had to give life to the threat. If there wasn't a legitimate threat, Saddam Hussein was not going to allow inspectors in. Now, let me make two points if I may. Ed [Gordon] questioned my answer. The reason I can't tell you to a certainty whether the president misled us is because I don't have any clue what he really knew about it, or whether he was just reading what was put in front of him. And I have no knowledge whether or not this president was in depth--I just don't know that. And that's an honest answer, and there are serious suspicions about the level to which this president really was involved in asking the questions that he should've.
With respect to the question of, you know, the vote--let's remember where we were. If there hadn't been a vote, we would never have had inspectors. And if we hadn't voted the way we voted, we would not have been able to have a chance of going to the United Nations and stopping the president, in effect, who already had the votes, and who was obviously asking serious questions about whether or not the Congress was going to be there to enforce the effort to create a threat. So I think we did the right thing. I'm convinced we did.
There's something endearing about the effort of Kerry's supporters to make a virtue of his intellectual disorder by calling it "nuance." It's unnerving, though, to think that Kerry actually believes this is clear and precise.
A Nader Surprise?
Last week the Associated Press published a presidential poll that showed President Bush essentially tied with John Kerry: Bush had the support of 46% of registered voters, to 45% for Kerry. Somewhat surprising, though, was that Ralph Nader got 6%, more than twice his 2000 popular-vote showing.
Now, this column is inclined to agree with the conventional wisdom that Nader is unlikely to be much of a factor in November. But just for fun, let's consider a contrary view.
In 2000, the Nader vote seems to have been an ideological protest vote; his support came from those on the far left of the political spectrum, for whom Bill Clinton (and by association Al Gore) was too moderate. This time around, this constituency seems focused on defeating Bush, and it has less to object to in the Democratic Party, which has moved in a McGovernite direction on defense policy and a Buchananite one on trade policy.
Yet not all Democrats are thrilled with John Kerry. (As an aside, try to wrap your mind around the phrase "thrilled with John Kerry" and you'll see why he might not be the strongest nominee.) Their misgivings are personal, not ideological. "Something in the vibration of that deep, pompous tone he adopts--the lugubrious, narcissistic fake gravity--grates on me," writes Democratic blogger Mickey Kaus, who ponders the practical implications of Kerry's shortcomings:
When President Kerry gets into trouble--when his first big proposals stall in Congress, when malaise or scandal arrives--he won't necessarily have the ability to go to the public and dig himself out. He'll be through, over.
Jimmy Carter took several years to reach that point. But Carter came into office as a highly effective salesman. It's not inconceivable, I think, that Kerry could turn into a Carter after several months. . . . In a parliamentary system, where a no-confidence vote can quickly produce a new government, this might not be such a disturbing prospect. But we have fixed presidential terms. Four years is a long time.
The Washington Post's Marjorie Williams, who describes herself as "a charter member of the ABB Society"--ABB is an abbreviation for "Anyone but Bush"--is also having cold feet about Kerry:
I've labored to turn my eyes from his career-long opportunism, the knowledge that Bay State political junkies trade their favorite Kerry flip-flops like baseball cards. . . . It's been especially difficult, but I work to achieve a kind of amnesia about Kerry's incoherent and changing explanation of his position--no, his positions--concerning the crucial issue of Bush's war in Iraq. . . .
Eight months is a long time for Bush to pile up a home-field advantage while Kerry's campaign decides how to fill in, complete and polish the invention that won the primaries. It's going to be hard to sustain, for so many months, the party's fond illusion that there is such a beast as "electability."
But I'm trying, I really am. Cover your eyes, and clap if you believe in Tinkerbell.
Let's suppose a significant number of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents come to share Kaus's and Williams's misgivings. Some of them may hold their noses and vote for Kerry anyway, and some may switch to Bush. But some would be unable to bring themselves to back Bush--maybe they can't abide his position on abortion or same-sex marriage, or they don't like his smirk, or they just would never vote GOP under any circumstances.
For such people, a protest vote for Nader would make sense. If they amount to, say, 10% of the Democratic-leaning part of the electorate, Nader gets 4% to 5% of the popular vote, besting his 2.74% in 2000.
In London's Daily Mirror, Christopher Hitchens observes: "I have never met anybody, nor seen anybody interviewed, nor received an email from anybody, nor read a letter to a newspaper from anybody who really woke up in the morning and thought: If John Kerry doesn't win, I just don't know what I shall do."
This is a little familiar, no? Think about the last time a longtime senator challenged an incumbent president. Conservatives and Republicans still find plenty of fault with Bill Clinton, but have you ever heard one say, "America would have been better off if only Bob Dole had been president"?
When Dole challenged Clinton, third-party retread Ross Perot got 8.4% of the vote.
Nameless Foreigners for Kerry
John Kerry is touting his putative endorsement by people who can't even vote in American elections. "I've met foreign leaders who can't go out and say this publicly, but boy they look at you and say, 'You've got to win this, you've got to beat this guy, we need a new policy,' things like that," Reuters quotes him as saying in Hollywood, Fla.
So who are these unnamed leaders? Well, we already know that North Korea's Kim Jong Il is plumping for Kerry. Another possibility is Yasser Arafat, whom Kerry described as a "statesman" and a "role model" in his 1997 book, "The New War," according to the New York Post.
What about Jean Bertrand-Aristide, Haiti's ousted dictator? Kerry tells the New York Times he would have intervened to keep Aristide in power, so it seems likely old JBA is a Kerry backer. Aristide is gone, of course, but the Associated Press reports that he "declared from African exile Monday that he was still president of Haiti." Presumably that means he can still issue endorsements in the American presidential race.
Meanwhile, Fox News reports "Iraq's Governing Council signed a landmark interim constitution on Monday, creating a 13-article bill of rights, setting up an outline for the parliament and presidency and enshrining Islam as one of the bases of law." Here's a summary of the new constitution, and here's the full text.
Saddam Hussein is incommunicado at the moment, but we wonder whom he'd endorse in the U.S. presidential race.
You Can't Spell 'Bible' Without 'Bi'
"I'm a Christian, I've read the Bible, and I know you can find the clauses that go both ways. I'm not here to argue that with you."--John Kerry on homosexuality, speaking at a black church in Tougaloo, Miss., quoted in the New York Times, March 8
Pass the Ketchup
"Kerry's Ex-Competitors to Eat Their Words"--headline, Associated Press, March 6
Another Roe Effect?
"The teenage pregnancy rate in America . . . has fallen steadily for a decade with little fanfare, to below any level previously recorded in the United States," the New York Times reports:
Experts can rattle off a litany of possible reasons for the turnaround: the fear of AIDS, and the impact of AIDS-prevention education; the introduction of injectable forms of birth control; changes in welfare policy and crackdowns on fathers for child support; the rise of a more religious and conservative generation of teenagers; an economic boom with more opportunities; and an array of new youth programs, especially those stressing both abstinence and contraception.
Now, what might have led to "the rise of a more religious and conservative generation of teenagers"? Here's one thought: According to the Times, "it is now clear that teenage pregnancy had already begun its decline in 1991, well before welfare changes and the economic boom, and well after the first round of sex education programs." The paper might have added: "and 18 years after Roe v. Wade."
Meanwhile, our item Friday on the correlation between teen abortion and Democratic votes drew these comments from reader Michael Nunnelley:
People sometimes say, "Well, if that's the case, why aren't these states switching to the Republicans?" I have a two-part answer.
First, liberal women don't get an abortion every time they get pregnant, so if a state is very liberal, it is still going to produce more liberals than conservatives. Only in close states could this flip the result of an election in a short period of time, the prime example being Florida. Taking just 1982, there were about 75,000 abortions performed in Florida. Can there be any doubt that with 75,000 more (mostly liberal) 18-year-old potential voters in 2000, Al Gore would be president now?
Second, the main impact in liberal states is the invisible impact on representation, because they are growing more slowly than conservative ones. Between the 1990 and 2000 censuses alone, six of 20 Gore states lost representatives, and only one (California) gained. The result is that Gore would lose 278-260 under new apportionment; the margin in 2000 (before a faithless District of Columbia elector abstained) was 271-267.
Working backward, if he carried the same states, Gore would have won under the apportionment systems of 1980 (271-267) and 1970 (278-260). That's also a 36-member swing in House representation for the red states after Roe, which is greater than the Republican margin of control.
At the level of congressional and Electoral College representation, however, Roe v. Wade actually works to slow the Roe effect. Several liberal states, including California and New York, had already liberalized their abortion laws before the Supreme Court's 1973 mandate, and others likely would have followed suit. Without Roe, states that declined to decriminalize abortion would have grown even faster than they did.
You Don't Say
"Stewart Conviction Likely to Hurt Company"--headline, Associated Press, March 5
This Just In
"Stewart's Defense Team Gambled and Lost"--headline, Associated Press, March 7
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She May Be Sharing More Than a Sink Before Long
"Stewart Shares Sink on Guilty Verdict"--headline, Associated Press, March 5
The Times Gets Naughty
From a New York Times article on same-sex marriage:
While gay and lesbian couples have seized the initiative by walking into town halls across the country seeking to be married, members of Congress, the State Legislature, the City Council, lobbyists, political strategists, advocacy groups, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and others have struggled to chart a course through a debate that has raised such passions that it is likened to other seminal flashpoints in contemporary American history.
"Seminal flashpoints"? Really, we understand that this is news, and the Times has to report on it, but is it necessary to use such vivid language? |
