"Who would you rather have in your corner, Sasso or Baker? In its hour of need the Kerry campaign brings on board James Sasso, breathlessly described in one news story as "canny and ruthless", but mostly known to the world as one of the men who ran the Dukakis campaign in 1988, which was about as far from "canny and ruthless" as you can go without leaving the earth's gravitational field. Right behind Sasso comes Stan Greenberg, fresh from his disastrous stint advising the Venezuelan right how to recall Hugo Chavez. Meanwhile the Bush crowd brings on former secretary of state James Baker to handle negotiations for the presidential debates. Yes, Baker, the man who negotiated the theft of the election in Florida in 2002. If you hunted for words that best describe Baker "canny and ruthless" would do nicely."
[Great. Besides the incompetence of Kerry's recent hires---the guy who ran the Dukakis campaign???---in his hiring of Greenberg Kerry manifests yet again his disregard for the good and the just, of a piece with his "complete" support of the Israeli separation wall. If Kerry wanted to hire an unscrupulous recaller of democratically elected officials, why not hire one of the successful unscrupulous recallers of Gray Davis?]
"When historians come to dissect the Kerry campaign they will surely marvel at the rich platter of issues handed the Democratic candidate which he has thrust from him with shudders of distaste and instead turned back, like Mencken's Bryan, to swat at flies.
"Read the report of the 9/11 Commission, as Kerry and his "strategists" [...] have surely done and there are mounds of fragrant dung to hurl at Bush and Cheney: the warnings from the FBI and CIA ignored by the White House; the obvious lies about Cheney getting Bush's go-ahead to issue the shoot-down orders that never reached the Air Force pilots.
"You'd think that the Kerry campaign would have put together a group of 9/11 widows and, along the lines of the swift boat vets, had them trail Bush, denouncing him as the man who slept through the warnings of imminent attack by Al Qaeda. It's all there on the plate, but Kerry has spurned it. 9/11 is off the table.
"Read the US Senate report on the manipulation of intelligence to concoct the bogus WMD, used as the rationale for invasion. The report is replete with detailed stories of Cheney's eight visits to the CIA hq at Langley to browbeat the analysts, plus scores of kindred jimmying of the data. Kerry could have said he'd voted war-making powers to the president, because he and his colleagues were served up lies.
"But no, Kerry hops around on the issue all summer and then, after all the war-whoops in Boston, he loses it at the Grand Canyon, saying that 'knowing then what he knows today' about the lack of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons in Iraq, he still would have voted to authorize the war. [...]
"As a piece of tactical stupidity it's hard to beat, particularly when there was absolutely no pressure on Kerry to say [...] any such thing. There on the plate in front of Kerry was probably the best documented account of White House deceptions in living memory and he thrust it away. Fake WMDs are off the table.
"In fact the whole war is off the table, vanishing into velleities as Kerry refines and redefines, shifts from foot to foot and says he would have done it all different [...]
"In Afghanistan America's man Karzai can drive around bits of Kabul in relative safety, same way that America's man Allawi can display himself in a couple of acres of downtown Baghdad. Elsewhere the Taliban rules and Osama takes his noonday hikes in the Hindu Kush. But for Kerry Afghanistan is off the table.
"Pretty much everything's off the table except for some Kerry rhetoric which no one believes about a health plan and taxing people who make more than $200,000. As Bush told the crowds in Ohio, the Kerry plan will never fly because everyone knows the rich don't pay taxes anyway. The US Supreme Court? Kerry said in mid-summer he wouldn't hesitate to nominate an anti-choice justice. On the heels of this crafty rallying cry to his core supporters he sent the Rubin-like disclaimer that he wouldn't want to have a Supreme Court that reversed Roe v Wade..
"At a quick count, off the agenda of debate this year are the role of the Federal Reserve; trade policy; economic redistribution; nuclear disarmament; reduction of the military budget and the allocation of military procurement; the role of the World Bank, IMF, WTO; crime, punishment and the prison explosion; the war on drugs; corporate welfare; forest policy; the destruction of small farmers and ranchers; Israel; Cuba; the corruption of the political system."
So, what's left of the left, of apt criticisms of Bush, or of anything that might push someone to vote Democratic, in Kerry's agenda? Almost nothing. It's worth our asking what explains the non-barking dog in this campaign.
When someone claims to want P, but doesn't do the things which are clearly requisite in order for them to get P, one may reasonably surmise that they don't really want P.
So far as I can tell, there are two explanations here. One is implausible, though not impossible: namely, that Kerry is throwing the election. It's implausible, but not impossible. Maybe someone has some big-time dirt on him. Maybe the Republican and the Democratic leadership really have merged. Maybe there's a tremendous amount of money in it for the involved parties. Implausible, but not impossible.
More likely, however, is that Kerry simply doesn't really want to win.
I've long thought that the real reason Gore gave up so easily in 2000 was that he really didn't want to be president. Not that this isn't understandable, especially after one has been the target of lying Republican attacks for months on end, and the achievement of the presidency promises (at least) 4 more years of perpetual sliming (as witness our last Democratic president's experience). It would exhaust even the most noble servant.
Seeing how this incredibly lame campaign is (not) shaping up, I'm starting to believe that the same thing is true of Kerry. He needn't even be conscious of his lack of desire to win; in any case his real desire to lose would inform his decisions about how to run his campaign. How else to plausibly explain the bizarre kid-gloves treatment of Bush and his gang?
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