Political Winds

Much has been made of the fact that John Kerry’s political hero is John F. Kennedy and that Kerry’s initials are JFK. Well, Mr. Kerry, if you really want to be like Kennedy, now’s the time. Or more precisely, it’s on Thursday night when you debate the president. At that moment, you should emulate the first JFK’s debating syle and strategy, at least in certain respects.

The popular mythology is that Kennedy won almost solely because of Nixon’s five o’clock shadow, droplets of sweat and weasel-like appearance. Certainly the physical contrast between Kennedy and Nixon was a significant factor. But implicit in the myth is the notion that it was somehow unfair to make a judgment based on the candidates’ appearance and demeanor. I’ve always thought that’s a little silly considering that we all look people in the eye and make visceral assessments that often turn out to be accurate.

Beyond that, and more important in terms of the upcoming presidential debate, is to look at Kennedy’s success in overcoming the perception that he was too young and inexperienced in foreign affairs compared to Nixon. After all, Nixon had been a fairly high profile vice president for eight years and had stood toe-to-toe with Khrushchev in the famous “kitchen debate” (Nixon’s experience was important, notwithstanding Eisenhower’s response to the question of whether he had adopted a single major idea of Nixon’s: “If you give me a week, I might think of one…”). As Robert Dallek writes in his book An Unfinished Life, Nixon “used his introduction and summary to draw contrasts between himself and Kennedy,” whereas Kennedy spoke directly to the American people in broader terms in his opening and closing statements. The result, says Dallek, is that “Kennedy came across as a leader who intended to deal with the nation’s greatest problems” while “Nixon registered on voters as someone trying to gain an advantage over an adversary… he came off as unstatesmanlike…” Dallek quotes Nixon’s running mate, Henry Cabot Lodge, who said, “That son of a bitch just lost the election.” Kennedy’s ability to articulate a vision for America was a big factor in his triumph over Nixon. At the same time, Kennedy talked tough on national security and the Eisenhower-Nixon record on defense, and he did it in a way that Theodore White said was “calm and nerveless.”

John Kerry may not be as good-looking and charming as John Kennedy was, but he doesn’t have to be in Thursday night’s debate. What he has to do is communicate a 1) positive vision for our country with some specifics, 2) attack Bush and 3) appear “calm and nerveless” in accomplishing all of this:

1) Bush talks in broad strokes, but they are so blandly repetitive and increasingly belied by the facts in Iraq and elsewhere that Kerry has a real opportunity to draw a contrast. Call it “reality-based vision.” Kerry can do this by punctuating his broad themes with specific ideas and facts. Those specifics are important not only in and of themselves but to add credibility to the “vision soundbites,” no matter how strong they may be. Even though it won’t be a topic in the first debate, let’s use health care as an example. Don’t just say, “I will make affordable health care a right - not a privilege - for every American.” (from the Kerry Web site). Say, “I will make affordable health care a right - not a privilege - for every American. I’ll do it by helping employers with the highest cost cases so they’ll be able to offer affordable insurance to more people.”

2) It’s been said that Kerry has to show he’s a fighter in response to Bush-Cheney’s attacks because if he won’t fight for himself, people won’t believe he’ll fight for the country. I think there’s truth in this. Moreover, we all know the price Kerry pays if he lets attacks go unchallenged. Furthermore, he must continue to weave a narrative about Bush’s lack of credibility. Obviously Kerry has plenty of ammunition here, and this tactic is critical to building his case against Bush on every policy issue. Go after Bush on no WMD, no “imminent threat,” no Al Qaeda-Iraq link, on letting Bin Laden get away, on letting Afghanistan slide toward chaos, on doing nothing on terrorism in the first eight months of his administration, on the August 6th memo, on failing to secure ports and taking other steps after September 11th, on the destruction of America’s image abroad and its tangible effects, on unfair taxes, on job losses, on environmental degradation and regulatory retreat, on extremist judicial nominees, on erosion of the right to choose and other civil liberties, on the increase in poverty and those without health insurance, just to name a few. The challenge here is that there’s enough material to keep Kerry on the attack for the three debates and many more. Obviously he can’t do that and also offer a positive vision. So pick a few items and use each one to both attack the policy itself and Bush’s credibility.

There’s another reason for Kerry to go on the attack. Bush has a clear vulnerability under tough questioning - he has a thin skin. Kerry shouldn’t let Bush be the “guy you want to have a beer with” (I never bought that anyway) - make him squirm and smirk, John.

3) The reasons for appearing cool and calm are obvious. That said, Kerry can and should be passionate when appropriate, i.e., in talking about 44 million Americans without health insurance, more people in poverty, the strain on the troops and their families, and so on. You know, “We can do better.” Kerry, constantly accused of being “aloof” by the media, can’t afford to be technocratic and Dukakis-like even though he needs to convey cool confidence. I think he can find the balance.

Some pundits will have you think the basic rules of rhetoric have changed in this age of the 24-hour news cycle. Well, they haven’t. The fundamentals remain the same as those identified by Aristotle. He identified three elements a speaker needs to succeed:

1) logos - the facts, mam. This means the speaker should find the common ground with the audience based on logic and reason. The speaker needs to connect the facts to the concerns and perceptions of the audience. It’s the difference between saying, “Mr. Bush misled the country on weapons of mass destruction,” and “Remember when Mr. Bush told us almost two years ago to the day, on October 7th, 2002 ,that ‘Iraq could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year.’”

2) ethos - credibility, qualifications and character. This doesn’t mean just reciting your resume. It’s more to do with how you carry yourself and whether you appear to be a straight-shooter or a manipulator.

3) pathos - the emotional appeal to the audience. This element does not necessarily require direct pulling of the heartstrings. It does mean that the speaker needs to make abstract ideas real to the audience. Anecdotes and examples are a good way of doing this. Instead of just talking about what’s been happening in general with National Guard troops, for example, cite the case of what one particular soldier and his family has had to endure.

I have no doubt that Kerry can meet all three imperatives. I’m more worried about the post-debate spin by the pundits and so-called experts who are themselves being relentlessly spun by the Bush people as the debate draws near. But that’s a topic for another day.

Going back to Kennedy and Nixon, Robert Dallek wrote,

[H]however assailable Nixon was as a contradictory figure and abrasive personality… it was his identification with recent economic and foreign policy stumbles that made him most vulnerable to defeat. And those were the issues, under the heading “Let’s Get the Country Moving Again,” on which Kennedy criticized him most effectively in the last weeks of the campaign.

In the first debate with Nixon, Kennedy had a lot to say about how American security depended in large part on the kind of society we strived for at home:

If we do well here, if we meet our obligations, if we are moving ahead, then I think freedom will be secure around the world. If we fail, then freedom fails… I should make it very clear that I do not think we’re doing enough, that I am not satisfied as an American with the progress that we are making… I’m not satisfied, when we have over $9 billion dollars worth of food, some of it rotting even though there is a hungry world and even though 4 million Americans wait every month for a food package from the Government, which averages 5 cents a day per individual.
I saw cases in West Virginia, here in the United States, where children took home part of their school lunch in order to feed their families because I don’t think we’re meeting our obligations toward these Americans.
I’m not satisfied when the Soviet Union is turning out twice as many scientists and engineers as we are.
I’m not satisfied when many of our teachers are inadequately paid, or when our children go to school part-time shifts. I think we should have an educational system second to none… These are all the things I think in this country that can make our society strong, or can mean that it stands still.
I’m not satisfied until every American enjoys his full constitutional rights. If a Negro baby is born, and this is true also of Puerto Ricans and Mexicans in some of our cities, he has about one-half as much chance to get through high school as a white baby. He has one-third as much chance to get through college as a white student. He has about a third as much chance to be a professional man, and about half as much chance to own a house. He has about four times as much chance that he’ll be out of work in his life as the white baby. I think we can do better. I don’t want the talents of any American to go to waste.
I know that there are those who want to turn everything over to the Government. I don’t at all. I want the individuals to meet their responsibilities and I want the States to meet their responsibilities. But I think there is also a national responsibility.

Go get ‘em, John Kerry. Tell the country, “We can do better!”

There’s a good movie premiering next week at the Toronto Film Festival and opening nationwide on October 1st. No doubt you’ll hear something about it in the mainstream media, probably that the film is fairly effective, but merely another polemic, a political ad for John Kerry and therefore not to be taken too seriously. Many in the punditocracy will dismiss it as just more propaganda propelled onto the battlefield of the nasty presidential election war. That’s too bad, because “Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry” is a powerful and worthy movie. Yes, you could say it works as a long campaign commercial, but it’s a documentary, not a polemic. “Going Upriver” uses vast amounts of archival footage of the Vietnam War and anti-war protests, some of it previously unseen. For those undecided voters who may be lost in the fog of charges and counter-charges that the Republicans have used to obscure basic truths, this film may throw a little water in their faces and wake them up to reality. The question is, will they see it?

I viewed an almost-finished version of “Going Upriver” at a screening in New York on Thursday. The movie is largely based on Douglas Brinkley’s book, Tour of Duty, and is directed by Kerry friend George Butler who directed “Pumping Iron” (at the time Butler didn’t know he was doing a political biography) and “Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition.” Aside from the Kerry focus, the movie is a potent document of just how fevered and volatile the times were. In terms of the current political battle over Kerry’s service and his anti-war actions, the film made me want to scream about the utter absurdity of the debate. The footage and interviews absoutely put the lie to suggestions that Kerry wasn’t under fire or that his anti-war protests represented a “flip-flop” or that they were politically opportunistic. “Up the River” vividly portrays the horrors that John Kerry and the Swift Boats faced on the Mekong River and how Kerry earned his Silver and Bronze stars. As you witness the bullets whizzing by, the hidden dangers along the river banks, the dead and dying, the phony body counts and the lies perpetrated by our leaders, you see Kerry’s evolution to anti-war leader as both inexorable and admirable. Another piercing section of the movie puts you in the hotel room in Detroit where the Winter Soldiers testified to atrocities in Vietnam. Looking at their faces and hearing their voices, a reasonable person would have difficulty questioning their motives or credibility. The anti-war John Kerry shown in “Up the River” is clear in his convictions, passionate but cool-headed, and a moderating influence on some of his fellow protestors. And when you see the turmoil in the streets of the nation’s capital, it’s hard to conclude Kerry made a calculation that his leadership in the protest movement would be good for his political career.

Will Americans see this true picture of John Kerry or the one the Republicans are painting in abstract impressionistic tones? Unfortunately, for many voters, it’s easy to be blinded by the fog of political war. It must be said, as Frank Rich suggested in his column today, that Kerry has helped obscure the personal qualities on display in the film with his less-than-clear and less-than-clearly-stated views on the Iraq war. Now is the time for Kerry to find his voice and cut through the fog.

Even if Kerry sharpens his message, it won’t be easy, of course, to penetrate the media fog machine being powered by a steady diet of irrelevant details. In the end, does it really matter so much whether or not the CBS documents on Bush’s National Guard service are authentic? Doesn’t the argument obscure what by now is an obvious truth - that Bush got into the “champagne unit” of the Guard because of family connections and that he didn’t show up for a significant portion of his obligation? Isn’t it an obvious truth that Kerry had the guts to go to war, and when he saw it was wrong, the courage to lead in the protests.

There are too many realities being obscured by a mainstream media that is content to do play-by-play commentary on the campaign. The daily blow-by-blows are easier to cover and more susceptible to spin than the rapid deterioration of the US effort in Iraq. In the mainstream media, especially on TV, Americans hear much more about the latest poll numbers than the loss of the Sunni triangle. Usually the only way Iraq gets on the front pages or in the mouths of the cable anchors is when a lot of Americans get killed in one day or very occasionally when an enormous number of Iraqis lose their lives in an attack. Meanwhile, post-GOP convention Time and CNN polls and subsequent headlines made it appear Kerry was suddenly bleeding voters. No matter that many experts were highly skeptical that the “headline” numbers were accurate or valuable in predicting a trend (see Ruy Teixeira ’s excellent analysis on this) or that the election dynamics had changed among key groups of voters. No, the cable blowhards and headline writers would rather blather on about Kerry’s “bad month” than about the bad situations in Afghanistan or Fallujah or North Korea.

Here’s another question for the esteemed members of a free and vigorous press: where is their in-depth coverage of the serious allegations made by Senator Bob Graham concerning an administration cover-up of official Saudi connections to Al Qaeda? Oh, it must be lost in the fog of the political war. So, if you want some real reporting on the Saudi connection, you’ll have to go to Greg Palast, an investigative reporter who writes for Britain’s The Observer.

Today’s Worth Checking Out

This is kinda fun - a BBC reporter’s new book says that Colin Powell called the neocons “fucking crazies.”

Media Matters for America has some good analysis of the CBS documents controvery.

New Yorker editor David Remnick has an interesting piece on Al Gore that provides some insight into his utterly strange circumstances.

Today’s The Hill has a follow up piece.

Josh Marshall has it right:

The nugget of this one is really clear. Hastert goes on Fox raising questions about the source of Soros’s money; and when he’s called to account he responds by pointing to groups to which Soros gives his money. Hastert was trying to be cute with his words but that’s the way slimesters always operate.

And in his letter there’s even more dreck like this: “I also believe that 527 political organizations set a dangerous precedent for political discourse because we don’t know where the money comes from. For all we know, funding for some of the 527s might come from foreign sources or worse.”

Dennis Hastert is generally portrayed in the mainstream media as a regular Midwestern guy, the high school wrestling coach-turned-House Speaker who somehow found himself working with barekuckles politicians like Tom DeLay. Well, now this down-to-earth Republican who once coached kids on the rules of fair play is using bare knuckles, letting his elbows fly, and much worse. As reported by today’s The Hill, Hastert is throwing manure at George Soros:

The spat began in an interview on Fox News with anchor Chris Wallace, in which Hastert said, “You know, I don’t know where George Soros gets his money. I don’t know where — if it comes overseas or from drug groups or where it comes from. …”

Asked if Soros had earned money from drug cartels, Hastert added, “Well, that’s what he’s been for a number years — George Soros has been for legalizing drugs in this country. So, I mean, he’s got a lot of ancillary interests out there. … I’m saying I don’t know where groups — could be people who support this type of thing. I’m saying we don’t know.”

It gets worse. The Hill has the courage to provide the larger context for Hastert’s slander:

Conservatives have sought to discredit Soros by attacking his foreign and Jewish roots and his support of liberal causes, and by saying that his currency speculation actually hurt the very people he claims to want to help.

“No other single person represents the symbol and the substance of globalism more than this Hungarian-born descendant of Shylock. He is the embodiment of the Merchant from Venice,” wrote GOPAC, an organization that helps elect GOP candidates, on its website last year.

In William Shakespeare’s “Merchant of Venice,” Shylock was the Jewish banker whose venality would not stop him from cutting human flesh to repay loans.

Tony Blankley, the editorial-page editor of The Washington Times, said Soros is “a robber baron, he’s a pirate capitalist, and he’s a reckless man” in an interview on Fox
News.

Will Hastert be challenged in the mainstream media on his malicious claims? Will this become a major story on the broadcast networks and cable news? Don’t bet on it.

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One other note… today The Washington Post editorial page once again blithely and approvingly cites a Republican line on why we had to go to war:

Mr. McCain offered a powerful argument for going to war in Iraq: that whether or not Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, “freed from international pressure and the threat of military action, he would have acquired them again. . . We couldn’t afford the risk posed by an unconstrained Saddam in these dangerous times.”

That sounds less like an argument for Bush’s headlong rush to war than it does for Kerry’s - dare I say it - more nuanced position, i.e. “international pressure” and “the threat of military action” (emphasis added) should have been pursued longer and might have avoided a war.