Writing Kerry

[Plaid Adder]

Since "The Fat Lady Sings" was posted on a forum called "The Right Society" (to give you a sense for what they mean by 'right,' they're selling a bumpersticker that has RUN HILLARY RUN in the middle with the slogan "Democrats place on back bumper...everyone else place on front bumper") I have been getting a fairly steady trickle of emails from right-wingers magnanimously offering to tell me what's wrong with me. They vary in tone from civil and respectful through patronizing and smug all the way to fantasizing about watching terrorists cut my head off in Fallujah (I didn't make that up, that's a real live example). I am filing them for future reference as I am rather short on goodwill at the moment.

Doing my own 'lessons learned' thinking about Debacle 2004 I did realize something useful that I learned from writing the column, which I didn't really process at the time. In order to write "The Immoderator" I had to be able to write dialogue for both Bush and Kerry. It was easy enough to write Bush, and of course easy enough to make it funny. I had a much harder time writing Kerry. It occurs to me that although this can partly be explained by my discomfort with some of his positions, it could also be explained by the fact that I genuinely didn't have a sense for him as a personality. I mean, sure, I hate Bush, but I knew how to recreate him in an instantly recognizable way. For Kerry, well, unless you're a cartoonist and can have fun with the Amazing Elongated Head, it's much harder.

So, if I as someone who is pretty used to creating characters and also desperately wanting to identify with him didn't have a strong enough sense of him as a person to make a character out of him, well, probably there were a lot of people out there who had an even weaker sense of him as a person.

This is not necessarily his fault, or the fault of his campaign. After all, we don't control the media. And, of course, it shouldn't have mattered, because being POTUS is about more than projecting an image of yourself. However, it does matter, and there we are.

C ya,

The Plaid Adder

[BamaLefty]

1. Debacle 2004

Voters never "knew" John Kerry like they knew Bush. From the Lambert Field incident to windsurfing to Manny Ortiz... and the flip flop label did him in. :mad:

[Leilani]

2. Right on target with the way I feel.

I supported Kerry against Bush, but I have no idea who Kerry really is.

And I watched C-Span obsessively; I probably heard every speech of his that was televised. I viewed the convention & his speech a few times. Saw all his soft, fuzzy interviews with Larry King & others.
And I still don't have a sense of him as a person, or what he really stands for, what he really believes vs what is he saying.

And that's a problem. If people don't know you enough to feel comfortable with you as their President, then they may vote for the unpleasant known, rather than the unknown.

[saracat]

3. Great point , Plaid adder. I always felt in order to be

a success a predisidential candidate has to make a cariacature of himself. He has to be himself only the largest possible almost cartoon of himself. Kerry tried too hard to protect his image. That goes along with my rant about being all things to all people. I had a discussion with Mike McCurry towards the end, which is when he came abroad, and he agreed. Kerry couldn't make a joke of himself. He most outstanding quality was being presidential and intellectual. He would have done better if instead of trying to change that he allowed himself to be the most presidential and studious person who ever lived. And use it as his theme and then make fun of himself! Bush did exactly that, through no fault of his own. That was how Karl Rove made lemons out of lemonade. Remember Bush making fun of his own intelligence? It doesn't matter what you are so much as you are something. Kerry was afraid to take that risk. Too bad. He would be a wonderful president!

[zeemike]

4. I have become so cynical

That I wonder if it was not all in the plan.
That Kerry was a Palooka set up to louse so that Hilliary could run and win in 08. That the Democrats or most of the leadership in the party have signed off on PNAC and wanted bush to finish the job he has started so that they would have clean hands yet complete the PNAC goal.
And they are sure the American people are stupid enough to buy it and with the help of the media will just rewrite history to make it seem natural.

[Buck Rabbit]

5. I spent the whole time hoping he didn't mean half the things he

said. That most of it was play it safe noncommittal wait until I'm elected, this isn't the real me, wink wink, election speak.

Some of us hoped the young John Kerry, fighting against a wrong war was in there. Others were worried that the John Kerry that volunteered to fight an unjust war and them voted a carte Blanche approval for another one was the present JK.

People like myself who were spending money and effort to get him elected were hoping this candidate Kerry was not going to be President Kerry. His vehement opponents also felt that was not the real John Kerry but a positioned John Kerry. I believe that a tremendous amount of Bush's votes were because people who vote character and are indifferent to issues thought they knew who Bush was but had no clue which was the real John Kerry.

[LittleClarkie]

7. Sad that both sides agreed about him -- but in my eyes both were wrong

I spent much of my time during the campaign on here saying "No, that's not campaign speak. He means it." I had the advantage of having read "A New War." I realized how strongly he felt about fighting terrorism. He rarely said anything on the subject I didn't expect him too.

He was way more hawkish than the left wanted him to be. The best he could say was that he would have gone after the man who attacked us first -- Bin Laden. Much of the rest of Kerry's war on terrorism would have been much more covert and less flashy. He'd have gone after the funding of terrorism (as in the rampant Afghan drug traffic) and used more diplomatic avenues.

The War Resolution in his hands would have indeed been used as a last resort, and he'd have had a way out again or he woudn't have gone in. (Gads I loved it in the first debate when he slapped Bush with his own father's words.)

He finally started finding ways to talk about Iraq coherently towards the end, with the wrong war at the wrong time. He wouldn't have gone in there first, and not at all if he could have helped it. But since Bush had already fubared the thing, Kerry felt they'd have to glue the pieces back together before they could get out.

I can't fault a man who has a background in international crime, was talking about terrorism right before 9/11, practically predicting what happened, and was in one of the building that could have been hit on 9/11 (some reports say that's where the third plane was headed).

[LittleClarkie]

6. I got more of a sense of him from old profile articles I'd find

than anything I saw during the campaign. Salon had a great piece. I also remember looking at Tour of Duty and starting to get a sense of who this person was in 1971, when I found a picture of him and his fiance right after the medal toss, where he was crying. It had the same impact of seeing someone like your father cry. I had one of my Starbucks breakdowns over that. I was so touched.

Going Upriver also helped me see the real man. Another source was a profile put together by CNN (or was it MSNBC?) talking about that same time period also added to my esteem, especially that he was man enough to go and forgive Nixon before the man died, and shake his hand. I thought that took an awfully big man.

I swear, sometimes, that man's outside doesn't match his inside. He looks perpetually stiff even when he's sincere.

The first damn time I connected with him emotionally was watching him after a speech with veterans. He warmed up so damn much in those encounters. To me, that's a large part of what makes him tick. Veteran issues loom large in his legend.

Sad that someone needs to make a cartoon of one's self. What was Bill's cartoon, I wonder.

[Plaid Adder]

8. Bill's cartoon

Oddly enough, the whole womanizing thing may actually have helped him during the campaign. His cartoon was part "charming rogue/silver-tongued devil," part "hometown boy made good," and part "sensitive 90s guy." Everyone knew he was smart, but he had other qualities that 'made up' for it (I know, I know, intelligence shouldn't be a liability, I know, I know, but for a lot of people it is, and I have the playground scars to prove it). Let us remember that Clinton went to Yale too, but he had a Southern accent and a blue-collar pedigree.

And speaking of being all things to all people...Bill Clinton wrote the book on that, and that was one of the things about him that frustrated the hell out of me. And they trotted out the flip-flop thing with him too--although with him it was "waffle." The thing is that not enough people cared, because they liked watching him feel their pain.

Basically with things as they are now, whoever you run has to be able to make it as a TV star. Some people can project on the small screen and some people can't. This is why the RW seems to have such a penchant for running actors. Can Schwarzenegger govern? Not necessarily, but he can act, and talk about your cartoons. Reagan? Same thing.

Poppy Bush was utterly dismal on the acting front and that's probably part of why he went down in flames after one term (having defeated a guy who also would never win a Golden Globe). Bush's act is a huge turn-off to around about half the country, but to around about half the country it's apparently very appealing. God alone knows why. His *positions* are often inconsistent and self-contradictory and he shifts with the wind as much as the next guy. But as a person, Bush is pretty consistent. Consistently heinous, as we know, but consistent.

One thing I have been saying to people lately is that with all the bullshit that got said about Clinton, nobody ever accused him of being a mindless pawn in the control of someone else. But that is something that was said about both Reagan and Bush II. Maybe this has something to do with the RW recognizing that campaigning is basically about acting and they want someone who's coachable on the campaign trail and manipulable once you get him into office. Clinton was nobody's pawn, but he did have an amazing ability to _be_ whatever he needed to be at any given moment.

I suggested a while back that we should run Martin Sheen. I was kidding at the time. Now I'm not so sure.

Ah well,

The Plaid Adder