Thursday, September 23, 2004
Road Warriors
I am all about the 21st Century, baby. Greetings from the road, Kalamazoo, Michigan, this time, where my wireless-enabled, battery-powered laptop and I are having lunch at a bagel shop. (I am trying to keep the crumbs out of the keyboard.) And here are some things I think I think:
I think Kerry's Iraq speech this week has really rattled the Bush team. Their instantaneous response, in the form of an attack ad showing Kerry windsurfing, has been criticized as trivializing the war and the service of those in harm's way (not to mention the Iraqi dead). And you gotta wonder if maybe a light went on somewhere, perhaps in Karl Rove's brain, that a week from tonight Bush and Kerry are going to stand on the debate stage together, and Bush is going to have to justify the mess yet again, in a forum that may not permit him to weasel away as easily as he's been able to before.
Assuming that the debate actually happens--that there is no sudden crisis that makes it unseemly for the Leader of the Free World to stoop to mere partisan politics--whether Bush is finally held to account on Iraq depends on a couple of things. First, on how effectively Kerry presses him. I have worried since last fall about whether he will be able to bring himself to drop the hammer when the moment arrives, or whether he'll waver. And second, how much holding-to-account the debate moderators and panelists will permit. (Yesterday, Atrios imagined a 2004 version of Bernard Shaw's famous 1988 debate question, about whether Mike Dukakis would favor the death penalty for his own wife's murderer, that I am praying someone will ask--and I'm an atheist.) Bob Schieffer of CBS was set to moderate at least one of the debates--and while Schieffer's an experienced reporter, you have to wonder how tough a CBS guy will let the panelists be on Bush, given the recent perception that they set out to sandbag him with the faked National Guard memos.
I think that we're still debating Vietnam after all this time is both weird and not. Not, because both candidates served, or didn't. Weird, because despite what you've been hearing since the Swift Boat Liars story broke last month, America is not divided over the Vietnam Era. There is widespread agreement that the war was unjust--and by margins that have changed only, well, marginally since Gallup first started asking about the war in 1965. This week, Michael Tomasky of The American Prospect analyzed the fake divisions and the reason we've been hearing about them--much of the modern conservative movement is predicated on keeping the divisions of the 1960s alive. He also says that the Swift Boat ads worked, truthful or not--they did what they were intended to do, considering that the tactic is a time-tested Rovian technique that's worked for 20 years.
Recommended Reading: It's been a newspaper joke for years that a typical headline in an American paper is something like, "No Americans dead in Chinese earthquake that kills 100,000." If it happens on the other side of the world, we don't really care all that much unless Americans are involved. Even in Iraq. If a day goes by with no casualties in Iraq, we tend to think nothing bad happened over there that day. That's not true, of course--it's never true. So Juan Cole tried to put it in terms we can understand.
New on The Hits Just Keep On Comin': Can't Keep It In.
I am all about the 21st Century, baby. Greetings from the road, Kalamazoo, Michigan, this time, where my wireless-enabled, battery-powered laptop and I are having lunch at a bagel shop. (I am trying to keep the crumbs out of the keyboard.) And here are some things I think I think:
I think Kerry's Iraq speech this week has really rattled the Bush team. Their instantaneous response, in the form of an attack ad showing Kerry windsurfing, has been criticized as trivializing the war and the service of those in harm's way (not to mention the Iraqi dead). And you gotta wonder if maybe a light went on somewhere, perhaps in Karl Rove's brain, that a week from tonight Bush and Kerry are going to stand on the debate stage together, and Bush is going to have to justify the mess yet again, in a forum that may not permit him to weasel away as easily as he's been able to before.
Assuming that the debate actually happens--that there is no sudden crisis that makes it unseemly for the Leader of the Free World to stoop to mere partisan politics--whether Bush is finally held to account on Iraq depends on a couple of things. First, on how effectively Kerry presses him. I have worried since last fall about whether he will be able to bring himself to drop the hammer when the moment arrives, or whether he'll waver. And second, how much holding-to-account the debate moderators and panelists will permit. (Yesterday, Atrios imagined a 2004 version of Bernard Shaw's famous 1988 debate question, about whether Mike Dukakis would favor the death penalty for his own wife's murderer, that I am praying someone will ask--and I'm an atheist.) Bob Schieffer of CBS was set to moderate at least one of the debates--and while Schieffer's an experienced reporter, you have to wonder how tough a CBS guy will let the panelists be on Bush, given the recent perception that they set out to sandbag him with the faked National Guard memos.
I think that we're still debating Vietnam after all this time is both weird and not. Not, because both candidates served, or didn't. Weird, because despite what you've been hearing since the Swift Boat Liars story broke last month, America is not divided over the Vietnam Era. There is widespread agreement that the war was unjust--and by margins that have changed only, well, marginally since Gallup first started asking about the war in 1965. This week, Michael Tomasky of The American Prospect analyzed the fake divisions and the reason we've been hearing about them--much of the modern conservative movement is predicated on keeping the divisions of the 1960s alive. He also says that the Swift Boat ads worked, truthful or not--they did what they were intended to do, considering that the tactic is a time-tested Rovian technique that's worked for 20 years.
Recommended Reading: It's been a newspaper joke for years that a typical headline in an American paper is something like, "No Americans dead in Chinese earthquake that kills 100,000." If it happens on the other side of the world, we don't really care all that much unless Americans are involved. Even in Iraq. If a day goes by with no casualties in Iraq, we tend to think nothing bad happened over there that day. That's not true, of course--it's never true. So Juan Cole tried to put it in terms we can understand.
New on The Hits Just Keep On Comin': Can't Keep It In.
