THE SENATOR FROM COLORADO

Service Winner: Kerry's bio ads build a rags-to-ribbons myth (William Saletan and Jacob Weisberg, Slate, 5/4/04)

Of course, everything I've absorbed about Kerry from these ads is basically false. His dad wasn't an Army guy from the Rocky Mountains. He was a patrician diplomat from the East Coast, who raised his family in suburban Boston; Washington, D.C.; and Europe. John wasn't a scholarship kid at Yale. He was a privileged preppie from St. Paul's. He was opposed to Vietnam before he even went and volunteered partly, as he says, out of an idea service to country but also out of evident political ambition. When he got home, he was an antiwar activist, who threw his own or someone's else's medals or ribbons on the steps of the Capitol. He's not a conservative or even a centrist. In fact, he has a voting record as liberal as that of anyone in the Senate. He and McCain weren't trying to find lost POWs and MIAs in Vietnam. They were trying to prove there weren't any and thereby put the Rambo fantasy to rest. He voted for Clinton's 1993 economic plan, but to say that this act was responsible for creating 20 million jobs is an enormous leap, as is Kerry's contention that he cast the deciding vote (so did 50 other people). His daughter isn't related to his wife, and his wife is a tart-tongued jet-setter worth $500 million.

In other words, these ads are masterpieces of indirection. They paint an almost entirely fictitious portrait of Kerry without saying anything that is explicitly untrue. At the same time, the Bush campaign and the RNC are spending even more money to broadcast ads that create an equally misleading portrait of Kerry as a left-wing opportunist who talks out of both sides of his elitist mouth.

Misleading? Can Weisberg remember only one paragraph at a time?

Posted by David Cohen at May 4, 2004 8:55 PM