Mark Steyn MEGA PING!!
Posted on 03/01/2004 4:30:36 PM PST by Pokey78
The news that Boris Johnson and half his Tory colleagues have been flirting with John Kerry like a Congressional overseas exchange intern programme came as no surprise to me. Though the Senator likes to think of himself as exuding Kennedy-esque glamour, to Conservatives he has the reassuring mien of an unexciting Cabinet heavyweight back when the party still had heavyweights and a Cabinet to put them in.
You can see why the Tory benches have been mesmerised by the immobile features of the Botoxicated Brahmin: superficially, he has the air of a cadaverous Douglas Hurd. As the Tories used to say in the old days, he has bottom - though, in the current climate, Senator Kerry would perhaps be ill-advised to adopt it as a campaign slogan.
One appreciates that Dubya and his Texan tics are not to everyone's taste, especially overseas. That said, one reason why America is one of the few places on the planet where conservatism remains a going concern is because it's a vernacular conservatism, not the patrician kind.
Conversely, it's easy to mistake boringness for seriousness, as Dustin Hoffman and Barbra
Streisand did in last year's ratings-bust Oscar show. So I defy any Tory MP to spend as much time with Kerry as I have this past year and still say they want him on the BBC News every night for the next eight years.
In Ohio the other day, he was trying to attack Bush's economic policy for the benefit of the television crews and staggered through three minutes of puffy incoherence. At the end, the CBS guy said none of what he'd droned was usable and would he mind trying again. Eventually, they coached the Senator into a soundbite: "It's the biggest say-one-thing-do-another administration in the history of the country." He likes this so much he now uses it all the time.
I recognised the CBS problem. Last spring and summer, I went to three Kerry campaign events in New Hampshire, intending to write about them for the Telegraph. Each time, I staggered groggily out of the diner or American Legion hall and, after checking my pulse and administering self-resuscitation, I figured that everything he said was so rambling and platitudinous that to inflict it on readers would be unfair, if not actually career-jeopardising.
But I wrote the stuff down. He used the word "courage" a lot. He said that he had "the courage to take the tough decisions", and America needed "the courage to stand up". His campaign was billing itself back then as the "American Courage Tour". I think it was after his "Fresh Air Forum" (sadly misnamed) that I looked at my notes and found the following: "Sometimes real leadership means having the courage not to have any courage."
That can't be right, I thought. It must be two separate answers, or there's some missing words about a Senate Appropriations Bill in the middle that I left out. But funnily enough, I find if you stick it on the end of almost any Kerry response - the explanation as to why his vote in favour of the Iraq war was actually a vote against the Iraq war and the one about why his vote to refuse funding to the troops was actually evidence of his strong support for the troops - it makes things much clearer.
So the notion that Kerry is more verbally felicitous than Bush depends on one's appetite for sonorous senatorial blather. The Tory benches may have what Boris calls "a certain snobbish resistance to his syntax", but I love Bush-speak. "Misunderestimate" encapsulates brilliantly what his opponents keep doing.
Senator Joe Biden - a man so rhetorically insecure that he's the only presidential candidate ever to plagiarise Neil Kinnock - was bending Bush's ear about the need to take a more "nuanced" approach to Afghanistan, and Bush replied: "I don't do nuance." Beautiful, and pithy, and a lot funnier than anything in the Bush parodies.
The smart guys don't think it's funny. Richard Cohen wrote a column for the Washington Post, headlined "Bush's War against Nuance". If you've gone over to the forces of nuance, Kerry's your guy - or your nuancy boy. He's got nuances coming out of his nuances. As the New York Times put it in its endorsement of the Senator: "What his critics see as an inability to take strong, clear positions seems to us to reflect his appreciation that life is not simple. He understands the nuances."
That may be the most lethal endorsement since Al Gore leapt on the Howard Dean bandwagon and sent it careering into the ravine. Just for the record, Kerry can take strong, clear positions. It's just that he tends to take both of them. For example. On January 22, 1991, he wrote to Wallace Carter of Newton Centre, Massachusetts:
"Thank you for contacting me to express your opposition to the early use of military force by the US against Iraq. I share your concerns. On January 11, I voted in favour of a resolution that would have insisted that economic sanctions be given more time to work and against a resolution giving the president the immediate authority to go to war."
Nine days later, he wrote to the same Mr Carter in Newton Centre:
"Thank you very much for contacting me to express your support for the actions of President Bush in response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. From the outset of the invasion, I have strongly and unequivocally supported President Bush's response to the crisis and the policy goals he has established with our military deployment in the Persian Gulf."
It is in trying to reconcile both of his strong, clear positions that Senator Kerry winds up tying himself up in nuances. He was at it again this weekend. "This President always makes decisions late," he huffed apropos Haiti. Hang on. He's just spent the past year complaining that Bush makes decisions too early, rushing in when he could have spent another year or so chit-chatting with the French.
I'm sure there are millions of Kerry supporters who'd like to take a tough Kerry-like stand this November. The best way to do that, in the spirit of his war votes, is to vote for Bush and then spend the next 10 years solemnly explaining that that was your bold courageous way of expressing your opposition to Bush.
Last spring and summer, I went to three Kerry campaign events in New Hampshire, intending to write about them for the Telegraph. Each time, I staggered groggily out of the diner or American Legion hall and, after checking my pulse and administering self-resuscitation, I figured that everything he said was so rambling and platitudinous that to inflict it on readers would be unfair, if not actually career-jeopardising.
With little by way of political conviction, many Bush-haters resort to moral blackmailing, or hectoring the electorate. Bush is an idiot, they say, so you'd have to be an even bigger idiot to vote for him. Or they claim that voting Bush is bad for your health; or you might inadvertently help to poison some poor family in New Jersey.
Taken together, all this looks like an incoherent rant, a scream of rage against the Bush administration or "stupid white men," or chemical plants, or global warming, or political power in general. The aim may be to expose Bush as incompetent, stupid, and dangerous - but the anti-Bush brigades often do a better job of exposing themselves as politically lazy, cynical, and lacking in vision.
Indeed, if they aren't careful, such critics could prove to be Bush's secret weapon: The American electorate may tire of being cajoled and frightened into voting against Bush, rather than politically convinced to do so. Some might even be tempted to vote for him as a way of snubbing the critics who have patronized them. America's voters deserve better than this.***
Hey, at least he's consistent at flip-flopping. You can rely on Kerry to be all over the map on any given topic.
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