By Julian Tepper | October 14, 2004
The Washington Post publishes weekly Op-Ed page pieces by Harold Meyerson. Is it wrong to wonder "why"? The newspaper strives for a national, if not a world presence, so may I ask just what is it that Meyerson brings to the table to merit such an opportunity? After reading and thinking about several of his columns, and noting a consistent lack of logic and profundity, I am still in a quandary. Could it be simply his politics?
His column of yesterday (October 13; Labels That Don't Stick) is a good example of what he is without. He starts off with a meandering muse about the President's switch from commenting on Kerry as a "flip-flopper" to pointing out that he is the most liberal senator of them all, a switch that he attributes to the two most despised-by-the-Democrats bete noires, Newt Gingrich and Karl Rove.
Meyerson asserts that "John Kerry may be the most die-hard of liberals or a charter member of the Flip-Flop Hall of Fame—but he can't be both"? Why not? Because, opines, Meyerson, "[d]ie-Hard Liberals don't flip-flop." From this proclamation he segues into the remaining four-fifths of his article by applying it, in a manner most undecipherable, to yet another, that Kerry's idea of a health plan does not lead to a government bureaucracy that is massive.
At the domestic-issues debate last evening, the President and Kerry of course spoke about health care, and made their differences somewhat clear. Meyerson's predictions on how that portion of the debate would go were (except for the obvious point of federal government involvement) off the mark. But, no matter; predicting behavior is always a chancy enterprise. I'd like, instead, to deal with Meyerson's opening, the foundation of the rest of his piece.
First, I'd like to know the basis for his assertion that a die-hard liberal cannot engage in flip-floppery. Let's look first to the essence of each of those shorthand labels? We can argue about details and nuances, but I put it to you that one who is a die-hard liberal looks overwhelmingly to the government for problem-solving, and thinks it right, regardless of the effect on private business, to impose taxes to pay for the costs attendant to that political approach.
And, what is flip-floppery? Well, I think we can all agree that a person who has a penchant for saying different things on the same issue at different times or to different sets of people, and who does this to get enough votes to win an election, is a flip-flopper. (Note that I do not associate the term with constantly changing one's mind. I don't think that mind-changing is involved, at all. Rather, the flip-floppery that I define is characteristic of a person whose core is not comprised of values, whatever they may be, but consists of only wanting to get elected.)
So, then, why is it not possible for John Kerry to be both a die-hard liberal and a flip-flopper? Meyerson's "proof" comprises only the naming of four supposed die-hard liberals (Wellstone, T. Kennedy, Gruening and Sumner) who did not flip-flop on the issues associated with them. Meyerson may have thus demonstrated that a die-hard liberal need not be a flip-flopper; but, he came nowhere near establishing that a die-hard liberal cannot be one.
There are a host of labels by which one could characterize Meyerson's so-called thought pieces. Those that come immediately to mind include, among others, space-consuming, inane, fatuous, mindless, vacuous and characterless. Useful labels? Does the word, "glue," suggest itself?