Morning Reads: Caught in His Contradictions
With just 43 days to go, and nine positions on Iraq under his belt, John Kerry still struggles with his myriad contradictions on national security and the war on terror. When it comes to leadership, Kerry hasn't cleared the bar. He hasn't passed the test.
Morton Kondracke lays out the problem for Kerry:
However, his new team of message experts has yet to figure out how to help Kerry make sense about Iraq.
In his latest outing, on the Don Imus radio show, Kerry said there were "no circumstances" under which he would have gone to war in Iraq, yet "it was right to hold [Saddam Hussein] accountable." Imus, who has endorsed Kerry, said "I can't tell you what he said."
Kerry is suffering badly from his inability to lay out a consistent position on Iraq. Even in the Pew Research Center poll last week, which showed the two candidates running neck-and-neck nationally, Bush was leading by 52 percent to 40 percent on the question of which candidate the public trusted to handle the war.
It doesn't get much better for Kerry on other issues. Michael Barone writes:
But the bad news for Kerry doesn't stop at the top line. When you examine responses to other poll questions, you find no obvious lines of opinion that work in Kerry's favor. On qualities like "strong leadership" and "says what he believes," he is far behind Bush -- the attempt to present Kerry at his convention as a strong leader doesn't seem to have worked. On caring about people like you, usually a strong point for Democrats, he has no particular advantage. On traditional Democratic issues -- education, the economy -- he runs about even with Bush. On health care, he does somewhat better, and he has been pushing his health care plan on the stump. But it's not clear that that's a high salience issue this year.
For liberals, this campaign is shaping up like a bad movie they've seen before:
Says one Democratic consultant: "I would have called you crazy if in 1989 you would have told me that a decade and a half later this party was going to nominate Dukakis's lieutenant governor--another aloof Massachusetts liberal who would overconfidently feel he would mop the floor with this clueless guy named Bush. But I fear I've seen this movie, and it's 'Groundhog Day.' "
Like Mr. Kerry, Mr. Dukakis was a liberal at heart, but both were perceived as moderates until the fall campaign. Reporters, most of whom supported both Democrats, did all that they could to prop up that image. The need to preserve a moderate image prompted both candidates to talk evasively about issues; in his convention speech Mr. Dukakis famously declared: "This election is not about ideology, it's about competence." ...
Liberal journalists have started to pile on the Kerry campaign. "Kerry is Dukakis, after all," sighs Joe Klein of Time magazine. "Deadly dull, slow to respond, trapped in Democratic banality; he actually said he was for 'good jobs at good wages.' "
As a Yankee fan growing up in Brooklyn, Mayor Rudy Giuliani knows a thing or two about pulling for your team under adversity. What's more, his knowledge of the Red Sox may outstrip that of the Senator from Massachusetts. He offers this advice:
Kerry got mixed up recently when he told ESPN his favorite Red Sox slugger was "Manny Ortez," apparently confusing Manny Ramirez with David Ortiz.
The Democratic contender also said Eddie Yost, who never played for Boston, topped his list of all-time Red Sox greats.
"He played for the [Washington] Senators," said an incredulous Rudy, rightly pointing out that Yost never took the field for the Sawx as a player, although he did serve as a coach.
"And why not Ted Williams?" Giuliani asked. "Or Yaz [Carl Yastrzemski] or [Jim] Rice?
Over the weekend, we put up a video clip from the remarkable documentary, Nine Innings from Ground Zero . The clip shows President Bush throwing out the first pitch at the Yankees-Diamondbacks World Series in the month after the 9/11 attacks. Watch it here.
If you're closely watching this campaign -- or even reading this blog -- you know that the Internet has transformed campaign coverage. Time magazine (subscription required) takes a look at the role of new media in Campaign 2004:
The campaign also keeps a close eye on the blogs, using them, just as it uses Limbaugh, to mainline information to the G.O.P. faithful. "Blogs are what talk radio was a few years ago," says Bush campaign communications director Nicole Devenish. Her staff members regularly write, along with the message for the talk-radio circuit, the one that will go out to blogs and websites that link to the Bush campaign site. Bush staff members rely on technorati.com and truthlaidbear.com, which track political blogs and websites to see what items in local papers, on websites and in blogs are getting the most hits. "If a story moves up through the rankings and linking, we can know," says one of the Bush staff members assigned to alert the rest of the team about which stories are moving through the blogosphere. "We get indicators about stories before they break elsewhere. It's like an early-warning system."
That attention has proved fruitful, since blogs are where some of the most powerful if picayune attacks on Kerry have taken hold. When Kerry put Swiss cheese rather than the traditional Cheez Whiz on his Philly Cheese Steak last year in Philadelphia and last month in Green Bay, Wis., called the famous Packer stadium "Lambert Field" instead of Lambeau Field, the bloggers lampooned him for being out of touch. Does this matter? The Washington Post wrote off Kerry's chances in the key swing state of Wisconsin because his slip was "akin to calling the Yankees the Yankers or the Chicago Bulls the Bells."
Howard Kurtz writes that bloggers have gotten a lot of attention recently, and says they can be fast and ferocious, especially when attacked:
Not everyone is a fan. Former CBS executive Jonathan Klein complained on Fox News that "these bloggers have no checks and balances. . . . You couldn't have a starker contrast between the multiple layers of checks and balances and a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing."
The pajama brigade pounced. After all, they had found problems that CBS had missed or minimized -- and had done it by downloading the memos from the network's Web site. "One of the things about a blog is we sometimes act as a clearinghouse for information from readers with an interest in an esoteric area," says Scott Johnson.
