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Politics : Don't Blame Me, I Voted For Kerry -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wayners who wrote (27322)	6/1/2004 10:05:23 AM
From: JakeStraw	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 81568

Gore and Kerry should both just zip it and go away By Maureen Dowd Posted on Tue, Jun. 01, 2004 An outraged president called last week for the immediate resignations of Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, George Tenet, Condoleezza Rice, Douglas Feith and Stephen Cambone. Unfortunately, it wasn't the president in the White House. It was the shadow president, the one who won the popular vote. Thundering at New York University about the man the Supreme Court chose over him, Al Gore said, "He has created more anger and righteous indignation against us as Americans than any leader of our country in the 228 years of our existence as a nation." Holy Nixon! The former vice president accused the commander in chief of being responsible for "an American gulag" in Abu Ghraib, as depraved as anything devised by the Marquis de Sade. It was hard to tell whether President Bush would be more offended by the sadomasochism or by the fact that the marquis was French. Gore blasted the administration's "twisted values" and dominatrix attitude toward the world: "Dominance is as dominance does." "George W. Bush promised us a foreign policy with humility," he said, in one of the most virulent attacks on a sitting president ever made by such a high-ranking former official. "Instead, he has brought us humiliation in the eyes of the world." (He did not ask the neocon cabal ringleader, Dick Cheney, to step down, perhaps in a spirit of second-banana solidarity.) John Kerry's advisers were surprised and annoyed to hear that Gore hollered so much, he made Howard Dean look like George Pataki. They don't want voters to be reminded of the wackadoo wing of the Democratic Party. They would like Gore, who brought bad karma to Dean with his primary endorsement, to zip it and go away. But more and more Democrats think it is Kerry who should zip it and go away. Kerry has made a huge $25 million ad buy in recent weeks, believing that the better voters know him, the more they'll like him. But many Democrats fear he's one of those supercilious/smarmy candidates (like Al Gore) for whom the opposite is true: the more you know him, the less you want to see him. They wonder whether Kerry should just let the campaign be Bush vs. Bush. As the president's old running buddy, Lee Atwater, used to say, don't get in the way when your rival's busy shooting himself. Couldn't the Democratic standard- bearer use a William McKinley front-porch strategy, talking only to those who bother to show up at his front porch? After all, Kerry and his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, have five front porches, stretching from Sun Valley to Nantucket and Georgetown. Kerry, once a critic of campaign financing abuses, had toyed with the idea of not accepting the nomination at his nominating convention so he could spend even more in contributions. While he announced last week that he had dropped that belittled idea, maybe he just didn't take the plan far enough. Maybe he shouldn't go down from his town house on Beacon Hill to the Fleet Center at all. The conventioneers may be more galvanized if they focus on vividly vivisecting Bush, instead of being dulled to distraction by Kerry, waving stiffly in his Oxford-cloth shirt, trying to be all things to all people all the prime time. ------------------------------------------------------------ Maureen Dowd is a columnist for The New York Times, 229 W. 43rd St., New York, NY 10036. sunherald.com