All Profile, No Courage
Doug Ireland is a New York-based media critic and commentator.
Why is George Bush doing so well in the polls? John Forbes Kerry’s post-primary lead has now evaporated in the last five weeks, to the despair of Democratic operatives all over the country. What happened?
For one thing, the disastrous U.S. occupation of Iraq"and the rebellion against it that has united Shiites, Sunnis and ex-Bathists"has actually worked to Bush’s electoral advantage. The 9/11 syndrome is still going strong: the bloodbath in Iraq has hyped fears of another major terrorist attack here at home. In the latest Gallup survey, nearly three quarters of the country now expect another one. And when Americans in the heartland are afraid of an exterior enemy, they become more reflexively nationalist. Which is why, in this week’s Washington Post poll, more than six in 10 approve of the way Bush is handling the war on terrorism, and a majority (54 percent) support the sending of more troops to Iraq.
The numbers are almost identical in this week’s survey by Gallup for CNN/USA Today, in which, as the paper put it, "By 2-to-1, voters say only Bush, not Kerry, would do a good job in handling terrorism. By nearly as much, 40 percent to 26 percent, they say only Bush would do a good job in handling the situation in Iraq." Moreover, a Louis Harris survey released April 22 showed that 51 percent of Americans still believe that Saddam Hussein actually had weapons of mass destruction, while just 38 percent don’t. And 49 percent think evidence of a Saddam-Al Qaeda link has been found (and only 36 percent don’t). Outside the Boston-New York-Washington media corridor, two years of the Big Lie technique with which the White House has pummeled the electorate on Iraq have left their mark.
Hobbled by his Constitution-shredding vote to give Bush a blank check for war, JFK has been unable to exploit the Iraq disaster because doing so would require him to question the reasons we invaded in the first place. And that would simply provide the Republican attack machine with another excuse to paint him as a waffler"the principal characteristic which voters now identify with Kerry, as Peter Hart’s latest focus groups (reported in The Wall Street Journal) demonstrate. In the Washington Post poll, some eight in 10 say Bush "takes a position and sticks with it," while only four in 10 believe that about Kerry. This is not simply a result of the GOP’s $50 million blitz of attack ads. It reflects Kerry’s finger-in-the wind approach to issues and the inconsistencies between his long Senatorial record and the constantly shifting, poll-driven positions he’s taken in his campaign (a reminder of why only three U.S. Senators have ever been elected president in the history of the Republic).
Bush, by announcing he’ll let the United Nations pick the new government for Iraq to which the United States will hand power in two months, has taken off the table the one major difference with the administration that Kerry has articulated. And yet Kerry’s incompetent campaign has chosen this moment to spend $17 million in part to air an ad on Iraq in which JFK reiterates his vague noises about "internationalizing" the occupation while providing no specifics"a bizarre decision. This is the first of the Kerry ads to bear the personal signature of Bob Shrum, Kerry’s pricey media-and-message guru. But when Shrum’s tawdry squabbling over power and money (in a dispute over who’d get the huge commissions for buying the ads) hits the front page of The New York Times, that’s the sure sign of a campaign that is in deep trouble"and of a consultant who’s out of touch with reality.
Unwilling and unable to attack Bush on Iraq, Kerry is likewise finding it hard to get traction on economic issues because he has no coherent or credible message that resonates with the electorate. The Washington Post’s Jim VandeHei, in an article headlined "Old School Team To Sell Kerry as a Modern Centrist," interviewed Kerry’s top command and dissected the JFK strategy on the economy: "Kerry and his advisers seek to blend a traditional populist rant against big corporations with policies designed, in part, to placate business"such as his across-the-board tax break for corporations." This sort of hypocrisy (which also bears Shrum’s signature) won’t wash"particularly with Bush able to point to 500,00 new jobs so far this year (even though they’re mostly low-paying service sector ones) and an over-inflated Dow holding steadily above 10,000 (at a time when 54 percent of Americans"largely through their 401Ks"are stockowners, this Wall Street bubble is unlikely to make them nervous.)
In fact, as the excellent Craig Crawford pointed out in a must-read Congressional Quarterly column on Kerry’s policy dance to the center as a self-proclaimed "entrepreneurial Democrat," "Remember triangulation? Well, it’s back." The retread Clintonistas like Roger Altman and Gene Sperling who have crafted Kerry’s milquetoast, pro-corporate economic approach have ceded to Bush on the central Republican theory of supply-side economics instead of challenging it. To Bush’s simplistic but appealing slogan of "Tax Cuts Work," Kerry opposes only... more and slightly different tax cuts.
Where is the soaring vision of government as the protector of the economically powerless, the left-outs and the have-nots against unbridled corporate power, as opposed to the Republican portrayal of government as the enemy of the people? Kerry may trot out a few Shrum-scripted populist phrases to cover up his lackluster Bush-lite economics, but this cosmetic overlay is unlikely to energize the Democratic base"in sharp contrast to Bush’s use of the hot-button social issue of gay marriage to reignite the enthusiasm of the conservative and Christian right (another issue, by the way, on which Kerry has straddled"opposing Bush’s Federal Marriage Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, but supporting a similar amendment to the Massachusetts Constitution banning same-sex weddings ).
As one Michigan labor pol fumed to me this week, "Kerry is running a Seinfeld campaign"it’s a campaign about nothing." At the moment the only thing our modern-day JFK"who is all profile and no courage"has going for him is that he’s not George Bush. Is that enough to win an election against an incumbent with a 3-1 money advantage? I doubt it.
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Published: Apr 23 2004
