The guy everybody hates to love.
Alex asked what I had to say about Sully's "endorsement" of John Kerry, and I will try to respond in greater detail later. But reading through it, the first thing that jumped out at me is how truly tepid the endorsement was. It was, much like the Slate endorsements, mainly a critique of Bush, followed by a meek little "so I guess I'll vote for Kerry." This seems to be the defacto position these days, especially among liberals and Democrats (yes, they're very different), to the extent that you must wonder who the hell voted for him in the primaries because nobody seems to like him in even the slightest.
But from his principled stand against Vietnam, a wildly unpopular thing to do despite people trying to paint it as some kind of cynical jumping off point to a career in politics, to his takedown of BCCI, Kerry really has done an awful lot of standing up for what's right. The man may not be a great candidate, but he sure as hell seems qualified to be President, and hoepfully at least a few people know the difference between the two positions.
Anyway, The Rude Pundit gives us a good rundown: "Kerry's done a fuck of a lot more than pull a guy out of a river. And the fact that America doesn't know that says a great deal about how we negotiate our desolate political landscape."
But from his principled stand against Vietnam, a wildly unpopular thing to do despite people trying to paint it as some kind of cynical jumping off point to a career in politics, to his takedown of BCCI, Kerry really has done an awful lot of standing up for what's right. The man may not be a great candidate, but he sure as hell seems qualified to be President, and hoepfully at least a few people know the difference between the two positions.
Anyway, The Rude Pundit gives us a good rundown: "Kerry's done a fuck of a lot more than pull a guy out of a river. And the fact that America doesn't know that says a great deal about how we negotiate our desolate political landscape."
1 Comments:
Well, I think America's lack of knowledge on Kerry can be blamed on one man: Kerry. He had his big chance to make us love him at the Demo Convention, but all he did was tell America how he single-handedly won Vietnam -- and then exposed the entire war as evil. Come again? (If there's been a shrewder way in political history to pander to a war-hating far left base, *and* grab conservative voters, I'd like to see it.) Hell, I came out of the Demo Convention knowing more about John Edwards and Barak Obama than I did Kerry. And I think he's going to be our next President!
As for the lack enthusiasm for Kerry: We must remember that the entire Democratic Party has become based around the decidedly simplistic notion of "Anybody But Bush." I think this explains why many of the Kerry "endorsements" suck balls. As Jacob Weisberg says on Slate, "If elected, Kerry would probably be a mediocre, unloved president on the order of Jimmy Carter. And I won't have a second's regret about voting for him."
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