John Kerry leaped back into the race with a
bravura performance against the President, but failed to deliver a fatal blow
with his greatest weapon: Bush's pathological dishonesty. Bush has been so
successful in defining Kerry as weak, waffling, cowardly, and untrustworthy
that his entire 10 point rise since the Repub.
Convention was based on it. These were intimate, vicious, dishonest attacks on
Kerry's character; and required a powerful personal response- a roundhouse that
would knock Bush out of the ring.
And Jim Lehrer, bless his heart, gave him the
fat softball, right down the middle of the plate. But Kerry stepped out of the
box.
LEHRER: "You
have repeatedly accused President Bush of ...lying ... about Iraq. Give us some examples of
... his not telling the truth." KERRY: "Well, I've never used the
harshest word. ..he told Congress about nuclear
materials that don't exist.. he said he would exhaust
the remedies of the UN.. he misled ...when he said
we'd plan carefully ..(and) go to war as a last
resort."
That was it. Nothing about the WMD's that didn't exist, "the smoking gun of a
mushroom cloud", the humble foreign policy, the balanced budget, the uniter not a divider, the dozens of monstrous blatant
screaming lies. JFK was solid, macho, scholarly, concise, Presidential, polite; but what the public needed and wanted was toughness.
Bush needed to be punished for his cheapjack slanders. He should have
INTERRUPTED Bush when he lied about Saddam-Osama
links: "I
know Osama attacked us! I know that."
"Then why did
you LIE about their connections again and again. Why did you INVADE another
country and kill 40,000 people based on baloney? How can we believe anything
you say?"
It is quite likely Bush would
have completely cracked, regressing to some fatal childish phrase.
Kerry has to focus on a single theme (like
Bush did with inconsistency)-that Bush lies- every Administration
statement can be successfully mined for evidence of this. It also would
inoculate Kerry from the outrageous slanders that Bush concocts (including the Swift
BoatBushies). Chuckle them off: "See, there
he goes again.", rather than whine about unfair attacks. Once one overcame
the media barrier to that word, the press would finally start to analyze Bush's
serial lies- they would be in play. Why did Kerry vote for the resolution
against Iraq? BECAUSE BUSH LIED TO US! No candidate has ever had a
fatter target than the dishonesty and corruption of the Bush Administration,
but Kerry initially handcuffed himself with the high-road positive-image
strictures that I think did in Al Gore, who could have dissected Bush like a
biology class frog in the debates. Exposing Bush's LIES also undercuts (the
inexplicable) public confidence in his leadership and supposed strength. It
isn't mean- after the blizzard of Administration lies... it's necessary.
The second theme should be corruption - the
$10 bilVeep/Halliburton
contracts and sleazy overcharging (running empty trucks through the desert),
the great Cal. energy robbery and Enron enrichment, the payoffs to
drug, insurance, credit card companies. This flip-flop thing can be turned
right around on Bush, from his wildly varying claims about Osama/Saddam
connections, to his sudden acceptance of global warming, to his
rejection and courting of the UN.
The one big lesson of my political experience
is that you have to respond to an unfair attack within 5 days. I watched Hart
be disemboweled by the idiot "Where's the Beef" ads in 2 weeks. One
third of people will believe any negative attack UNLESS it's immediately
refuted, butKerry ignored the flip-flop charges for many weeks.
It was agonizing to see the missteps the
campaign was making, from the prohibition against attacking Bush at the Vietnam-fest
Convention. Kerry just got a black woman national
security advisor spokesperson named RICE- another bizarre
imitation of Bush, like speaking at hostile venues right after Bush. John Kerry
has been tied in knots over Iraq and his shifting positions towards it, especially
when he said he would have supported the war even knowing there were no WMD's. To an extent that's inevitable: criticizing an
unwise war does undermine it, and open the candidate to charges of encouraging
the resistance, which Bush is furiously pushing. When Bush admitted the WAR on
TERROR would never end, Kerry should have jumped all over it: "Yes,
because you invaded Iraq and turned 50 thousand potential terrorists into
50 million". Instead he did a nyeahnyeah gotcha, "Oh you can't say that- I will WIN the
war on terrorism." But the phrase was chosen for it's
limitless possibilities, like the War on Drugs, terror will never end and never
be defeated. Had we concentrated everything we had, we may well have crushed Al
Qaeda within the next 2 years. With his reckless Oedipal invasion into the heart of the Muslim world, Bush
may have created a generational religious war that will see hundreds of
thousands of Americans die.
Kerry was masterful against a vapid
repetitive distracted Bush, who didn't seem to realize he was on camera. But
much of electorate are now uninformed dopes who've
ingested many helpings of propaganda, and Kerry may not have stomped Bush
enough to convince them.
NOTE: This was mostly written before the
first debate and transmitted to a top Kerry advisor.
Stylewise the Edwards-Cheney debate was a tie; Edwards
seemed nervous, blinking like a semaphore (maybe didn't practice under hot TV
lights), and relatively tentative. The consummate lawyer who had slayed innumerable corporate dragons for millions of
dollars, seemed to defer to the most extreme corporate villain. Edwards tried
to bring Cheney to justice for his many deceptions, but Cheney hammered back,
drawing blood with Edwards apparent horrible Senate
attendance record. In a harbinger of fatal danger, the ice may be cracking
under the weight of Bush's Iraq lies- the post spin nailed the malignant slandering Veep for his stupid claim that he'd never seen Edwards
before, and the amazing lie that he had never claimed links between Saddam and Osama. Edwards slickly praised Cheney for his
"acceptance" of his gay daughter (take that, Moral Majority) as
Cheney struggled to restrain the searing rage he must have felt. Uncle Dick has
been so relentlessly negative in his vicious attacks against Kerry, constant
alarmist scare tactics, and blatant untruths- that the press corps really dislike him. Dick tried to count the Iraqi losses as coalition
losses (they count if they're fighting us?), but that could have been turned by
just asking what the casualties were in the entire war. This administration
won't even tell us how many people we killed, a sad thing in a democracy (My
guess is 40-50K total). Edwards could have said: "The global test
is the SMELL TEST for rotten cooked Intelligence. YOU went down to the CIA 10
times to pressure them to change their intelligence to say Iraq was a threat; then when the occupation became a
disaster, you BLAME the CIA. This Administration takes NO RESPONSIBILITY for
anything and never admits mistakes. It's ALWAYS someone else's fault."
2nd KERRY debate was another near knockout by JFK, he categorically
shredded and dissected every Bush claim and position, but since Bush did better
than his disastrous first outing (which resulted in a 5-8 point poll shift),
spinners tended to see the contest as even. But Bush was angry, defensive,
sputtering, incoherent at points (several sentences were complete gibberish),
and kept flashing that unpleasant pained smug smirk like a facial tick. Bush's
awesome vacuity was evident as he returned to his simple flip-flop attack theme
at every question, "You can't be a leader and change your mind."- but had little else to say. He pluralized "the
INTERNETS" in a display of how out of touch this clown is- he not only
doesn't read any newspaper or magazine; he probably has never spent any real
time on the Internet.
3nd KERRY debatewas a relative tie, although of course Kerry had the far better
arguments. JFK takes definative cheap shot in bringing up Mary Cheney out of blue, stupid
when there are a thousand points of dark to blacken Bush with.
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KERRY's COMEBACK