Another Liberal columnist with second thoughts.
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Lighten Up, Kerry
By Richard Cohen
Thursday, April 29, 2004; Page A25
John Kerry has a "batman." This is a British military term for what amounts to a servant, someone to take care of an officer's personal needs. In Kerry's case it's Marvin Nicholson Jr., who keeps the Massachusetts senator in peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and bottled water. This, though, is the wrong man for the wrong task. What Kerry really needs is someone to slip him gags. He may be the presumptive nominee, but he is an objective pill.
Take the apparently endless flap about Kerry's Vietnam War record and his antiwar activism afterward. Did he really deserve all three Purple Hearts? Did he really throw back his medals, or was it ribbons? The questions themselves border on the ridiculous, especially when they are posed -- in a six-degrees-of-separation sort of way -- by a presidential ticket of George Bush and Dick Cheney, the former a no-show during some of his National Guard tour, the latter an anticommunist hawk who, wisely, delegated the fighting to others -- the mark of a budding CEO.
The situation was ready-made for humor, for an arid dismissal. Kerry was the hero -- Silver Star, Bronze Star, three Purple Hearts -- and the president had nothing to show for the Vietnam years except some nights he would like to forget. His formulation about those days was always, "When I was young and irresponsible, I was young and irresponsible," which is not exactly the citation that comes with a medal. The senator has the better of the argument. He should get a fourth Purple Heart for being fragged by the GOP.
But instead of dismissing Bush and Cheney with a lighthearted putdown of the sort that would prompt Bush to seek therapy, Kerry got angry. He waxed indignant. He said, in the manner of Rumpelstiltskin stomping the ground, "I'm not going to stand for it!" In doing so, he mimicked Bob Dole, who lost it entirely during the 1988 New Hampshire primary when he scowled at George H.W. Bush and snarled, "Stop lying about my record." For Dole, this was not good television.
As any angry person can tell you, expressing rage shows a loss of control. It both seems and feels juvenile. It borders on the tantrum, which is not presidential, and it is pretty close to downright un-American, since we in this country do not express our emotions, except on daytime television. Much more important, anger makes a television viewer uncomfortable, and I don't think this is how a presidential candidate wants us to feel. This is why politicians have aides: to express -- anonymously, of course -- their anger. This is what the aforementioned Mr. Nicholson should be doing.
Stop! Do not e-mail me, dear reader, on how I should not be constructively criticizing Kerry ("bashing," it is called nowadays) but instead should be saving the nation and the world from another four years of Bush and Cheney. That latter, though, is truly my intention. I am told that this is the presidential preseason, a period when only the cognoscenti and the mentally unhinged are paying attention to presidential politics, with everyone else waiting until after the World Series. It is now, therefore, while no one much is looking, that I can critique Kerry in an effort to make him a totally unbeatable candidate. He needs to lighten up.
I say that with a total lack of levity. My candidate is a dour man. At least that's the way he seems on TV. Sometimes he seems angry, which is not good, but most of the time he just seems gloomy. It does not help that he has a face that hardly needs to be enlarged for Mount Rushmore, but what really matters is that he seems as if he is no fun. No one would call Kerry, as FDR did Al Smith, "the happy warrior" or discern some impishness in him. Bush has that quality and so, of course, did Bill Clinton.
About the only recent presidents who were decidedly un-impish were Jimmy Carter, who came to Washington to take the fun out of politics, and the first George Bush, whose joke is only now becoming apparent. Both got the gate after just one term.
The attacks on Kerry's war record are contemptible, and the criticism for his own criticism of the war itself shows that the Bush-Cheneys of this world have, as was said of the Bourbons, learned nothing and forgotten nothing. But the way to handle such attacks is with ridicule, with nonchalance, with a confidence that the American people know a low blow when they see one.
Smile, John -- you're always on candid camera.
cohenr@washpost.com
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