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| Tuesday, August 3, 2004 |
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| Queue Up the Bogeymen, Boys |
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Contingency plans: The White House spins a backstory for claiming it "stopped" a terror attack
An interesting little contretemps played itself out on Drudge this morning. In one corner, the New York Times and Washington Post reported that Sunday's ballyhooed terror-plot warning was in fact based on seized documents written three or four years ago. Opposite them, Newsday and the LA Times touted claims that "U.S. authorities" insist the plot remains a going concern.
The dust-up gives every sign of being Bush administration stagecraft in the same spirit as their tales of Saddam's WMD. Even before the disclosure that the evidence in question was old, New York's financial district seemed an odd choice of targets: too much like the first attack, and largely superfluous in the sense that any major attack in the U.S. would play hell with the financial markets. It sounded like more desperate hype from the White House--doubly so when it was announced that the documents seized were several years old, and doubly so again when the administration began insisting it only looked like old news.
What's at stake here is not just another campaign-season elevation of the terror alert level. If the president's men succeed in convincing the public that the alleged plot was still in the works, and no such attack occurs before the election, they will be in a position to proclaim in the waning days of the campaign that W et al.--yes!--foiled a terrorist attack in the United States.
Naturally this will only matter in the event that there is not a real attack before November 2. Think of it as the unloaded gun mounted over the fireplace in the first act--in case no one shows up with a real one by play's end. |
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# -- Posted 8/3/04; 5:27:52 PM
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| Monday, August 2, 2004 |
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| Kerry's Gambit |
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Night of the Living Dems
John Kerry had a lot to prove when he spoke to the Democratic convention last Thursday night, not least that he was still alive and still wanted to be president. Since turning the primaries on their head in Iowa and locking up his improbable victory only a couple of weeks later, he had transformed himself into something less like a candidate than a wraith that materialized occasionally to haunt the campaign. He was never again as strong as he had been in the days when he was chasing Howard Dean and matching him blow for rhetorical blow against the Bush gang. Part of the reason was emotional stamina: Kerry was visibly worn out, had literally lost his voice, after Iowa. Two things became evident. Kerry, astoundingly, could summon real fire when he needed it. And he couldn’t keep it up for long.
But last Thursday night he did manage to conjure an hour’s worth of something close. If the cadences and the content were not exactly timeless, they were good enough. More important, Kerry looked and sounded right in the news clips which constituted all that most Americans would ever hear of the speech. The more vital question revolves around what he does now. Is it back into hibernation until October, or will Kerry start working to wrest the occasional news cycle away from Bush?
I’m betting the former is closer to the mark. But the call depends on how one reads Kerry’s invisible-man act to date. Admittedly, this is not entirely Kerry’s doing. The main subject on everybody’s mind is the, well, undeniably historic performance of George W. Bush, and rightly so. When someone seems, by any reasonable standard, so intent on braiding the rope, tying the knot, and hanging himself with it, it’s easy to suppose that the best thing is to stand back so everyone can have an unimpaired view.
This has been the main stratagem of the Kerry campaign so far, and it’s a dangerous one. The poison pill in the formulation is that phrase “by any reasonable standard.” Americans now are more nervous, confused, and angry than at any time since the Great Depression, and considerably more ignorant now than then, thanks largely to the undoing of public education over the course of 24 years’ unremitting conservative and neo-liberal rule. (The media deserve their credit, too.) We possess no sense at all of history. We know that references to democratic institutions and values are cues to nod vigorously, but most of us have no working notion of what they mean, or therefore of when they are being honored or violated. John Kerry needs to spell it out more frequently and more fervently. He needs to shape and amplify the meaning of Bush’s actions and sketch the countless scandals unfolding in erratic public view. He isn’t doing it and he probably won’t. He is, after all, the standard-bearer of the party too genteel ever to have explained to the country what really happened in Florida in 2000.
In going after Bush, Kerry’s choices are circumscribed not just by his tactical judgments but likewise by his character, sensibility, and record. This is not an election about ideology, as our political mythmakers would have it--as it should be. There may be large practical differences between Kerry and Bush (true or false, we’re betting the farm on it), but they disagree little on first principles. What is Kerry’s line about the outrageous and needless invasion of Iraq? It wasn’t wrong; he voted for it. It was just foolhardy to leap in so precipitously and so nearly alone. The domestic economy? Of course he’ll do splendid things for economic fairness at home. Or as splendid as former Clinton treasury secretary and Wall Street love slave Robert Rubin will permit. It was Rubin who got seated beside Teresa Kerry during John’s acceptance speech; if you wink any harder than that, you’ll put your eye out.
Kerry’s case against Bush comes down to the matters of recklessness and managerial competence. Bush is impetuous, facile in his thinking, and mean. He never does his homework or checks his expense account. He makes us look bad and alienates allies for no particularly good reason. His advisers and cabinet members are too rigid and too ideological, which is a rather more stately way of saying too impatient. But these are, from Kerry and the Democrats’ point of view, errors of judgment rather than direction. They thereby cede a lot of ground that ought to be getting scooped up and flung at Bush.
Here’s another sensible reason to doubt that Kerry will go for the president’s jugular anytime soon: the convention itself, an orgy of darned-glad-to-meet-you, wouldn’t-say-shit-if-we-had-a-mouthful bonhomie stitched together by sunny, desiccated music that only a radio station programmer would dare call “classic rock.” (Where was Cheap Trick’s “I Want You to Want Me”? Too contemporary? Too good?) The orations were mostly dreadful. On the night when Howard Dean and Teresa Kerry spoke, it sounded like someone backstage had filled a candy dish with Xanax. Only a few rose above the nice-folks torpor, or flouted it. Bill Clinton was more loose and more likeable than he’s ever been on a spotlight occasion. Ron Reagan disclaimed partisanship and then blasted Bush harder than any of the “legitimate” Democrats deigned to do. Al Sharpton was electrifying as he read aloud from the blueprint for the convention that should have been. Each spoke with a moral authority that derived largely from calling George W. Bush by his true names: tyrant, punk, fool. (And no, none used those exact words. Wasn’t necessary.)
For months now--since the Bush-bashing extravaganza in Iowa revealed the depth of popular animus toward the president, to be precise--the cable news savants have tended to fill the dead spots in their broadcasts with dutifully grave references to “this deeply divided country.” For once they’re right, even if they are no more illuminating on this subject than any other. So it did not seem inappropriate (unearned, yes; inapplicable, no) when Kerry and Bob Shrum dragooned Lincoln into the convention. He was there in Kerry’s acceptance speech, and more eloquently in Teresa Kerry’s address two nights earlier. It was a calculated effort to bestow upon Kerry the virtues of the picture-book Lincoln, a figure of enormous gravitas and responsibility who arose at a critical hour. The irony is that these times more closely resemble Lincoln’s than anyone dares to say, except that the fissures this time have less to do with race and region than with class and the naked exercise of autocratic power. It goes without saying that Kerry is no Lincoln. He is in fact a lot less than any nation with pretenses to democracy deserves at a time like this. But the more salient fact is that he’s not George Bush. So let him trade on Lincoln if he can pull it off. He’s got the stovepipe head for it. And if focus-group testing says that he’d benefit from growing chin whiskers for the duration of the campaign, he should do that too. |
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# -- Posted 8/2/04; 1:59:11 PM
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| Thursday, July 15, 2004 |
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| Is McCain the October Surprise? |
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Cheney rumors reach page one of the NYT
Elisabeth Bumiller writes this morning that one of the more super-heated rumors making the rounds in Washington has Dick Cheney resigning from the Republican ticket next month for opportunely timed health reasons.
She mentions by name Colin Powell and John McCain as possible replacements. The latter seems eminently more plausible--especially in light of the recent boy-bonding between Bush and McCain, who have long disliked each other intensely. I assumed the explanation involved dirt that Karl Rove had turned up about McCain or his family. Or perhaps McCain's striking public change of heart a couple of months back reflected a different sort of understanding entirely. |
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# -- Posted 7/15/04; 10:54:27 AM
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| Monday, June 7, 2004 |
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| Reagan's Legacy |
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He's dead, Jim: Ronald Reagan, 1911-2004
There are two Reagan anecdotes in particular that have always stayed with me. One involved his first wife, Jane Wyman, sitting off to the side at a 1940s Hollywood party where Reagan had embarked on one of his excruciating discourses about the Red Menace. Said Jane to a co-sufferer: "I'm so bored with him, I'll either kill him or kill myself."
The other concerned his son Michael's high school graduation. "I was real proud when Dad came to my high school commencement," the younger Reagan told an interviewer. After the ceremony, the old Hollywood pro sat for some photos with the class. He mingled with his son's classmates. He approached one young man, stared him in the eye, shook his hand, and said, "Hi, my name's Ronald Reagan. What's yours?" The young man replied, "Dad, it's me. Your son, Mike."
That was the Reagan seen most widely by those of us who despised what he stood for--the vacant, unstinting dullard whose rise was itself the greatest mystery. But it wasn't really so simple--Reagan, like W in our own day, was underestimated not to his peril but everybody else's. The following passage is from Gore Vidal's essay "Ronnie and Nancy: A Life in Pictures," a review of Laurence Leamer's starstruck bio of the Reagans.
Mr. Leamer might have done well to talk to some of the California journalists who covered Reagan as governor.... When I said something to the effect how odd it was that a klutz like Reagan should ever have been elected president, the journalist then proceeded to give an analysis of Reagan that was far more interesting than Mr. Leamer's mosaic of Photoplay tidbits. "He's not stupid at all. He's ignorant, which is another thing. He's also lazy, so what he doesn't know by now, which is a lot, he'll never know. That's the way he is. But he's a perfect politician. He knows exactly how to make the thing work for him."
I made some objections, pointed to errors along the way, not to mention the storms now gathering over the republic. "You can't look at it like that. You see, he's not interested in politics as such. He's only interested in himself. Consider this. Here is a fairly handsome ordinary young man with a pleasant speaking voice who first gets to be what he wants to be and everybody else then wanted to be, a radio announcer [equivalent to an anchorperson nowadays]. Then he gets to be a movie star in the Golden Age of the movies. Then he gets credit for being in at the start of television as an actor and host. Then he picks up a lot of rich friends who underwrite him politically and personally and get him elected governor twice of the biggest state in the union and then they get him elected president... The point is that here is the only man I've ever heard of who got everything that he ever wanted. That's no accident."
As for his legacy, I see that the first fusillade of obits is leaning hard on the end of the Cold War. That's fatuous--one of the objects of the Cold War all along was to make the Soviet Union spend itself into oblivion, and Reagan's was merely the hand at the rudder when the USSR entered its death throes. Reagan's real legacy is threefold: He demonstrated the viability, and tactical versatility, of the stage-managed presidency in the media age. Reagan was a ceremonial head of state whom hardly anyone took to be the guiding force behind his administration's actions. It thus became possible for Reagan to remain popular even when his policies were not. Was this disjunction the anomaly pundits made it out to be, or a subtle political triumph of the stage managers? The not-dissimilar ascent of George W. Bush and Karl Rove amounts to an argument for the latter.
Second, Reagan established the political template for the slow, deliberate dissolution of central government and of New Deal social guarantees. And he did it in the same manner that W. Bush now emulates: by simultaneously cutting taxes and sending defense spending through the roof, creating a fiscal crisis that--regrettably, regrettably--can only be solved by doing away with government as we've known it, which happens to include a slew of services most Americans would have no reason to wish away if the matter were put to a political debate.
Third, and most strikingly, he launched a cultural revolution. Reagan popularized the ideology of the marketplace that our politics takes entirely for granted now--the view that the dictates of money are the main organizing principle of modern life, and justly so. It followed that wherever your net worth placed you on the Darwinian food chain was where you deserved to be. "Morning in America" really meant waking up from history, from shame, from so much as the pretense of looking out for any but your own. The pernicious mantra of "family values"--meaning, really, the negation of any larger social values--started here.
W said on Saturday that Reagan would be in his prayers, which no doubt included the lament that the Gipper left us too soon--about four and a half months too soon. Brace yourselves for the most protracted public burial the world's ever seen. |
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# -- Posted 6/7/04; 2:44:19 PM
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