December 20, 2003
On Fools and Pundits
Below is a quote from this Kos discussion thread, discussing what Hitchens so aptly termed "the banality of Kerry".
The hapless "liberal" punditocracy
I love this story & the accompanying Pitt narrative.
As the pundits try to paint Dean as McGovern or even worse, Dukakis, Kerry would have been the true Dukakis candidate -- clueless Massachusetts liberal riding on his so-called achievements (remember the Massachusetts Miracle & how far that got our boy in the tank or was that our boy on the motorcycle).
What Pitt, Alterman (who's always struck me as a very lame Upper West Side liberal type unable to break out of the conventional wisdom) and the rest missed is something that the above article by Cynthia Tucker (much to my surprise) sort of hinted at: character. If Kerry trusted and misread Bush & Co, then how the hell could the American people in a general election expect him to stand up against the real bad guys.
The liberal Dems 0-- pro-war, anti-Dean, et al -- just don't get it, these times call for a fighter, not a wimp. Think back to the ridiculous Dem strategy during the 2002 elections -- to run on a platform of prescription drugs & social security when the stench of the burning towers had hardly dissipated across the land is a monumental mis-reading of the national psyche. The nation cries out for Conan and instead the Dems offer Clara Barton.
Dean came to the head of the pack not just because of his prescient stance against the war, but because of character -- he took a very unpopular stance -- in terms of the media, remember something like 60% were either against the war or wanted UN sanction last spring -- and stuck by it, in spite of all the conventional wisdom marginalizing him and this position.
I first came on board when I heard him last Jan or Feb on our local NPR affiliate doing an interview & call-in -- I said, whoa, who the hell is this guy, he's fucking strong. None of the usual liberal equivocation that makes liberals feel nice & good, he spoke in clear & direct terms. Not bogus, the way they make Bush out to be, but real, unscripted. This was the guy that America needs, in the mold of Al Smith or the progressives of old who actually fought for what they believed in rather than just playing nice and losing.
The final irony, of course, is that for all Kerry's foreign relations experience (within the beltway), the thin-resume'd Dean was right. This can't be emphasized enough.
What to say....Clearly, I think this is a very shrewd reading and I hope the poster is correct, because Dean definetly has the inside track now. We'll see.
That part of Dean's appeal is his straight-forward, tough image is a rather banal insight. I agree with it and the attendant criticism of the Democratic party establishment, but this poster's comments don't qualify as a "very shrewd reading" in my opinion.
Well what especially impressed me was how he explains the Dem failure in 2002 (as part of a larger cluelessness), especially his image of "the stench of the burning towers" and the attendant longing for a real leader. He strikes me as essentially correct and I've never heard this from any pundit.
Really? I've read numerous discussions about why they failed in 2002 and I don't generally read discussion boards, so it had to have been from "pundits".