The Latest Political Rant

by the world's least dangerous man

Okay, so I'm leaving the building for lunch yesterday (ummm... steak) and they're out there, this time with red shirts.

"Want to help us kick Bush out of the White House?"

On the way back into the office, two new ones, same red shirts...

"Do you guys want to kick Bush out of office?"

I decided to ignore the red shirts, since I've also seen them wearing shirts and ties, carrying clipboards and looking very earnest. I also successfully fought the urge to ask them how the three of us and their clipboard would succeed in their quest to remove Bush from the Oval Office (especially without Frodo and Sam). I did notice that one of the girls was really attractive (and that the guy with her spent more time leering at her than trying to make eye contact with passerby)

But I'm perplexed. I know what they're against -- George W. Bush, whom they believe to be the mentally-handicapped un-elected Texas cowboy-imperialist warmonger. They're against the Iraq war. They're against Bush's foreign policy. They're against tax cuts for the wealthy. They're against Bush's education policy. They may even be against campaigns against teenage alcoholism, if Bush supported such a campaign.

But what are they for?

Oh, I know that these Bush-haters can't actively campaign for Kerry without violating some arcane corner of McCain-Feingold, lest George Soros' money machine be implicated in something terrible, like engaging in First Amendment activity that doesn't involve Janet Jackson's nippleshield or Howard Stern swearing. And DNC staffers can't openly advocate anything in favor Kerry until he's officially the nominee, probably because it might offend the three people who like Dennis Kucinich. But what do they stand for? Do they even know?

You know, I try to understand. I remember how much I disliked Bill Clinton in 1996. I'm assuming that if I had been older than six, I might have developed a similar distaste for the Master of Malaise in 1980. Instead, I simply thought Carter was the goofy guy who liked peanuts, while Reagan looked nice and liked jellybeans, and I liked jellybeans better. I know that's a pretty dumb reason to choose one political party over another -- but it's still smarter than the idiot chant, "Bush Lied! People Died!"

Back to Clinton, circa 1996. I spent most of that year wondering how anyone with a functioning brain who wasn't ignorant or a left-wing zealot (note: yes, I know) could choose Clinton over Dole. Clinton was slime, and deserved to be in office about as much as Yasser Arafat deserved a Nobel Peace Prize.

But hating someone is never something the electorate will buy in spades, unless it's O.J. Simpson or Charles Manson. And chances are, if the person got elected President, people found plenty to like about the guy, so it's hard to convince them he's a bad guy. Put it this way -- people who voted for Clinton the first time around weren't going to be convinced that he was an evil person, just misguided. And most of the rest of the country, after four years of exposure to Clinton, thought of him as the ultra-smart frat guy frustrating the tight-assed dean.

It's different in 2004, I understand that. We're at war, and it's an issue that stirs passions. It may even stir enough passions to fatally damage Bush's re-election.

Except for this one thing -- most of the country doesn't hate George W. Bush. By that, I don't just mean everyone west of Cambridge and east of Berkley -- I mean the vast majority of the people in this country think Bush is a decent guy. They may have doubts about Iraq, may think he's misguided, may think he's not that smart, may wonder if we're doing the right thing at times, may even decide to vote for Kerry -- but they don't really believe in their hearts that Bush is a puppet of evil right-wing neocons, bent on war for oil and ready to send Ashcroft in to kill you if you speak up. Hell, most of them don't even believe that evil right-wing neocons exist, since we've done such a good job hypnotizing all of you.

What this says to me is that Kerry is doing the same thing Bush is -- appealing to his base, all the horsebleep rhetoric about unity aside. That's well and good, but Bush has a record to run on, and a clear set of principles he's advocating. If Bush is vulnerable on policy, it's on the right, where conservatives like me wish we'd cut spending and focus on real Social Security reform and tort reform. But Kerry won't run there -- he can't.

In the end, Kerry's not running for anything. He's not working at selling any specific policy changes or ideas, and he's definitely unable to articulate what Bush I called the "vision thing." All he's really doing is telling us that he's a war hero, and he's not George W. Bush.

The latter point will be enough to convince the folks in red shirts. But the danger in not articulating any particular ideas -- when all you're selling is yourself -- is that the voters in the middle might just prefer the guy who's telling them exactly who he is today (as opposed to who he was thirty years ago) and what he'll do. Reagan and Clinton are both derided by the opposition as nothing more than showmen, but both actually offered the voters ideas (the difference being, Reagan actually believed them, while Clinton believed more in himself), and the swing voters listened... mostly because the guy on the other side didn't offer a damn thing other than criticism and fear.

That's Kerry's real problem. He can make this election a referendum on the incumbent, but he can't make uncommitted voters choose nothing over something. And he's offering nothing to this point. He's offering his life story and his own personality -- the former is pretty irrelevant to the American public, while the latter is, to be charitable, not as nice as his hair. And that won't get the job done. It's one reason why I think Bush could win in a blowout.

Of course, maybe I'm wrong. But who are you going to believe, me or the attractive girl wearing the red shirt?

Okay, don't answer that.