Last week, for instance, it was disclosed that the Bush White House was once again touting health and education programs that the president has, in fact, cut. What do you do with people who brag of bringing heart defibrillators to communities across America when they’ve actually proposed slashing the defibrillator program by 82 percent? Apparently, nothing. If Kerry or his war room had a sharp rejoinder, it wasn’t sharp enough to break through the clutter.
Thucydides thought his fellow Athenians, for all their talk of democracy, were getting awfully arrogant and contemptuous at the end of the Peloponnesian War. It was a time, he wrote, when “reckless audacity” was seen as “courage,” and “prudent hesitation” was depicted as “specious cowardice.” For the ruling class, “moderation was held to be a cloak of unmanliness” and “the ability to see all sides of a question was accounted inability to act on any.”
If this sounds like a hit job on Kerry as a wimpy, feckless flip-flopper (Note to Karl: big ad buy during the Athens Olympics?), it also neatly summarizes the mind-set of the Bush crowd. Kerry’s challenge is to defy Thucydides and define a new kind of, well, manly moderation–with Bush as a surprisingly incompetent extremist. Everything else is secondary.
But so far, the Kerry campaign is still deep in the secondary, focused on fund-raising and logistics instead of crafting and executing the crisp message-of-the-day sound bites that have driven presidential contests for a generation. Take last week’s leak that Kerry might postpone his formal acceptance of the nomination until September for reasons of arcane campaign finance. (By scheduling its convention in September, the GOP will be able to spend much more than the Democrats in August, which is driving Democrats crazy.) As it happens, this is the way nominations worked for nearly 100 years. No party nominee accepted his nomination in person at the convention until FDR broke tradition and flew to Chicago in 1932.
But that history wouldn’t count for much with TV networks already starved for news at the July Democratic convention in Boston. If Kerry goes ahead with this gimmick, the anchors won’t hesitate to remind viewers they are seeing a fake acceptance speech–just what the Kerry camp needs for its postconvention bounce.
On the brighter side for Kerry was his skillful handling of Ralph Nader, a small sign of the diplomatic talent critical for the next president. Kerry avoided the temptation to score points by muscling Nader. After their meeting the cranky consumer advocate actually said something nice about someone else for a change. (He compared “spruce tree” Kerry to Al Gore, the “petrified wood.”) Nader will eventually turn on the Democratic nominee–he’s turned on many of his closest associates over the years (almost all of whom think he’s nuts to be running for president). But by praising Kerry now, Nader gives some of his supporters a road back to sanity. They can date Ralph, then marry Kerry, at least in battleground states.
The more pessimistic Democratic view is that Nader as the peace candidate will siphon off votes from Kerry, who is still a hawk on Iraq. But with Bush preparing to announce an exit strategy, Nader may be about to lose the most powerful rationale for his candidacy. Even if he still has the peace issue, I’m not sure Nader will tilt the outcome. Elections involving incumbents are rarely dead-even in the end. Late in the game, independents and undecided voters break strongly in one direction. They make a gut decision on whether to fire the president.
To persuade them to do so, Kerry must explain why the “courage” attributed to Bush is really more like “reckless audacity,” and how ceasing to be the “leader of the free world” makes it impossible to get enough help from other nations to win the war on terrorism. And he needs to do it in ways that connect at the breakfast table.
