SHADES OF CAMPAIGNS PAST

Slate is in the bag for John Kerry, but Chris Suellentrop has been traveling with the Kerry campaign and is getting frustrated by what a bad campaigner John Kerry is. In today's dispatch, he compares a Kerry speech as written to the same speech as delivered:

On the trail, dispatches from Campaign 2004: Kerry vs. His Script: Why can't the man read a simple speech? (Chris Suellentrop, Slate, 10/19/04)

Kerry's Script: I will work with Republicans and Democrats on this health care plan, and we will pass it.

Actual Kerry: I will work with Republicans and Democrats across the aisle, openly, not with an ideological, driven, fixed, rigid concept, but much like Franklin Roosevelt said, I don't care whether a good idea is a Republican idea or a Democrat idea. I just care whether or not it's gonna work for Americans and help make our country stronger. And we will pass this bill. I'll tell you a little bit about it in a minute, and I'll tell you why we'll pass it, because it's different from anything we've ever done before, despite what the Republicans want to try to tell you.

This is all funny stuff, but I was surprised by the extent to which Kerry argues that his plans are not Republican or Democrat, but just good ideas that he will execute competently. In other words, he is channeling Mike Dukakis' 1988 "technocracy" campaign. Now, the idea of anyone using the Dukakis campaign as a template is astonishing. Even stranger, though, is that the Democrats have claimed since 1988 that the take-away lesson from that campaign is that Dukakis started to close with GHWB when, a few weeks before the election, Bob Shrum convinced him to abandon technocracy as a platform and campaign on, you guessed it, "the people v. the powerful." If only, the Democrats say, Dukakis had started the progressive schtick a few days earlier, he would have won the presidency.

So, why is John Kerry, another Shrum candidate, executing a reverse-Dukakis?

Posted by David Cohen at October 20, 2004 02:12 PM