OBLIGATORY STALINIST REFERENCE?:

Cement Sack, Yes, but With Concrete Ideas: Kerry's inept, but don't rule him out yet. (JONATHAN CHAIT, 9/17/04, LA Times)

"I don't care if John Kerry is a sack of cement," former Texas Agricultural Commissioner Jim Hightower said in June. "We're going to carry him to victory."

At his very best, Kerry is capable of adequately delivering a prepared speech. But when speaking off the cuff, he has an inexplicable penchant to play into his opponents' hands. Bush implies (outrageously) that Kerry wants to go soft on terrorists? Kerry responds that he wants a "more sensitive war on terror." Bush portrays Kerry as an out-of-touch, Francophile elitist? Kerry tells GQ, "I love sports. French skiers." Bush paints Kerry as indecisive? Kerry volunteers that at restaurants, "You know when they give you the menu, I'm always struggling, what do you want?" It's as if he has somehow internalized his opponents' attacks upon him.

Nor can Kerry articulate his policies. Earlier this summer I listened as a friendly questioner at a Missouri event asked Kerry to describe his healthcare plan — not a trick question. He proceeded to blather on for some 10 minutes, in increasingly abstract terms, to the point where I had no idea what he was talking about. And I've written about healthcare and understand his plan, or at least I thought I did before he started explaining it.

If Kerry does not stage a comeback (and he well might — I lend great credence to the cement sack strategy), the natural next step is for people to rationalize his failure. If he can't run a campaign, the argument goes, he would never have been able to run the White House.

That sounds reasonable enough unless you consider the fact that George W. Bush is a highly competent campaigner but a flaming disaster of a president. And it is exactly those things that make him so ruthlessly effective on the stump — centralized authority, Comintern-like party discipline, total disregard for the truth — that have created a hermetically sealed petri dish in which bad policies come to life and are carried out unchallenged.

It's all so confusing--George Bush is Hitler, Goebbels, Stalin, Lenin, Jefferson Davis and Nathan Bedford Forrest according to these folks, but he's also an ineffectual drug-addicted dry-drunk moronic puppet of the Jews and/or big oil and/or the Sa'uds who's either imitating or reacting to his father at all times. Yet his politics and his speeches never waver. Odd that.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 17, 2004 9:42 AM