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Saturday, October 09, 2004
KERRY'S MISSED OPPORTUNITIES. David
Ortiz saved
me from a terrible dilemma last
night. If the Red Sox-Angels game had gone past 9 p.m., I'm not sure
what I would have done when the opening bell sounded for the second
presidential debate.
This morning, I still don't have a
particularly clear handle on what happened. On substance, I thought
John Kerry did far better than George W. Bush, just as he did in the
first debate. It wasn't just because I agreed with Kerry more often,
but because he offered clear, fact-filled explanations as opposed to
the campaign slogans that Bush likes to bark out. On the other hand,
there's no question that Bush was more energized and better prepared
than he had been in their first encounter. By being able to interact
with a crowd, the president was able to come off as more engaged than
he had been in the formal setting of a week earlier. Plus, he kept
the smirk under control.
My frustration is that I thought
Kerry missed a lot of opportunities to counter some of Bush's more
ridiculous claims. Unlike John Edwards, who was a master of looping
back, answering Dick Cheney's accusations, and then returning to the
question at hand, Kerry took too many strikes on pitches he should
have been able to hit. (Sorry. I'm still thinking about the Red
Sox.)
Perhaps the weirdest, if not necessarily the
most serious, example of this came when Kerry attempted to refute
Bush's notion that Kerry's proposal to raise taxes on Americans
earning above $200,000 will harm small businesses:
KERRY: Ladies and gentlemen, that's
just not true what he said. The Wall Street Journal said 96
percent of small businesses are not affected at all by my
plan.
And you know why he gets that count? The
president got $84 from a timber company that owns, and he's
counted as a small business. Dick Cheney's counted as a small
business. That's how they do things. That's just not
right.
Now, Kerry's delivery and syntax in this
instance were terrible. Maybe I'm unusually dense, but I couldn't
tell whether Kerry actually meant that Bush had invested in a timber
company, or was instead offering some sort of hypothetical using Bush
as a theoretical example. I decided it must be latter upon hearing
Bush's rebuttal:
BUSH: I own a timber company?
[Laughter]
That's news to me.
[Laughter]
Need some wood?
Worse, Kerry just sat there on his stool,
grinning, and never returned to the subject. Granted, it was a small
matter, but it was Kerry who raised it, and Bush had left him looking
like an idiot. Yet as we learned as soon as the debate was over, it was Bush who should have looked like an idiot, for denying
something that was clearly true. On ABC News, Jake Tapper noted that
Bush had, in fact, reported $84 in income one year from a timber
company. Here
are the details. It was a minuscule
point by Kerry, inartfully made, but Kerry should have at least made
it clear to everyone that he knew what he was talking
about.
And by the way, will the fact-checkers please
get off Kerry's back over the retirement of General Eric Shinseki in
2003? Here is what Kerry said last night:
KERRY: General Shinseki, the Army
chief of staff, told him he was going to need several hundred
thousand [troops]. And guess what? They retired General
Shinseki for telling him that. This president hasn't
listened.
Here is what CNN's
fact-checkers (among others,
including Tapper) said:
Kerry implies that Shinseki was
forced to retire as a result of his comments about troop levels in
Iraq, which is inaccurate. Shinseki served a full four-year term
as Army chief of staff, and did not retire early. Since World War
II, no Army chief of staff has served longer than four
years.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld decided
in April 2002 on who he would tap to succeed Shinseki, according
to a Pentagon official, long before Shinseki's troop level
comments in 2003. So by the time Shinseki made his comments on
troop levels, it was already known that he would not remain in his
post beyond his full four-year term. The Bush administration may
not have been fond of Shinseki, who was appointed to his post by
President Clinton, but it is inaccurate to say that he was forced
to retire because of his comments on troop levels in
Iraq.
That is true, and yes, Kerry should find a
way to make his point more accurately if he is going to keep
returning to the matter of General Shinseki. But CNN only hints at
the extent of the how deeply Shinseki and Rumsfeld clashed. For
instance, here is the top of a Washington Post story from
October 2002 on the reasons for Shinseki's retirement:
The biggest battle facing Donald
Rumsfeld is with the Army, the nation's largest military service,
which effectively has gone into opposition against the secretary
of defense.
Among all the services, the Army, for
institutional and historical reasons, is most skeptical of
Rumsfeld's drive to move the military into the information age.
Rumsfeld has complained that the Army is too resistant to change;
Army officers claim Rumsfeld doesn't sufficiently appreciate the
value of large, armored conventional ground forces.
"Does he really hate the Army?" asked one
Army officer, obviously pained by the question. "I don't
know."
The relationship, never close, hit the
rocks when Rumsfeld let it be known in April that he had decided
to name Gen. John Keane, the Army's vice chief of staff, as its
next chief, 15 months before its current chief, Gen. Eric
Shinseki, was scheduled to retire.
This immediately made Shinseki a lame
duck and undercut his ambitious "transformation" agenda, which he
had set forth in late 1999.
"I do feel that this secretaryship has
been very hard on this chief and has undermined his ability to
bring about the kind of transformation that Shinseki envisioned,"
said Rep. Jerry Lewis, R-Calif., chairman of the House
Appropriations Committee's defense subcommittee.
And here's the top of a USA Today
story from June 2003:
The former civilian head of the Army
said Monday it is time for the Pentagon to admit that the military
is in for a long occupation of Iraq that will require a major
commitment of American troops.
Former Army secretary Thomas White said in
an interview that senior Defense officials "are unwilling to come
to grips" with the scale of the postwar U.S. obligation in Iraq.
The Pentagon has about 150,000 troops in Iraq and recently
announced that the Army's 3rd Infantry Division's stay there has
been extended indefinitely.
"This is not what they were selling
[before the war]," White said, describing how senior
Defense officials downplayed the need for a large occupation
force. "It's almost a question of people not wanting to 'fess up
to the notion that we will be there a long time and they might
have to set up a rotation and sustain it for the long
term."
The interview was White's first since
leaving the Pentagon in May after a series of public feuds with
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld led to his firing.
Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary
Paul Wolfowitz criticized the Army's chief of staff, Gen. Eric
Shinseki, after Shinseki told Congress in February that the
occupation could require "several hundred thousand troops."
Wolfowitz called Shinseki's estimate "wildly off the
mark."
Rumsfeld was furious with White when
the Army secretary agreed with Shinseki.
So if Kerry wants to be more accurate, all he
needs to do is use White rather than Shinseki as an example of a top
military official who was fired for publicly disagreeing with the
Bush administration's low-ball estimates on the number of troops that
would be needed to maintain order in Iraq. Alternately, Kerry could
portray Shinseki as a hero who was forced to retire for having the
temerity to stand up to Rumsfeld, and who then became one of the most
outspoken critics of the White House's troop-strength
estimates.
And since Kerry's point is essentially
correct, the media fact-checkers ought to explain the context even as
they tut-tut Kerry for not being 100 percent accurate.
Finally, since everyone else is doing it,
allow me to indulge in a little cheap armchair psychoanalysis. I was
really struck by how Bush answered a question about the Patriot Act.
Audience member Rob Fowler asked, "With expansions to the Patriot Act
and Patriot Act II, my question to you is, why are my rights being
watered down and my citizens' around me? And what are the specific
justifications for these reforms?" Here is how Bush
replied.
BUSH: I appreciate that.
I really don't think your rights are
being watered down. As a matter of fact, I wouldn't support it if
I thought that.
Every action being taken against
terrorists requires court order, requires scrutiny.
As a matter of fact, the tools now given
to the terrorist fighters are the same tools that we've been using
against drug dealers and white-collar criminals.
So I really don't think so. I hope you
don't think that. I mean, I -- because I think whoever is the
president must guard your liberties, must not erode your rights in
America.
The Patriot Act is necessary, for example,
because parts of the FBI couldn't talk to each other. The
intelligence-gathering and the law-enforcement arms of the FBI
just couldn't share intelligence under the old law. And that
didn't make any sense.
Our law enforcement must have every tool
necessary to find and disrupt terrorists at home and abroad before
they hurt us again. That's the task of the 21st
century.
And so, I don't think the Patriot Act
abridges your rights at all.
And I know it's necessary. I can remember
being in upstate New York talking to FBI agents that helped bust a
Lackawanna cell up there. And they told me they could not have
performed their duty, the duty we all expect of them, if they did
not have the ability to communicate with each other under the
Patriot Act.
Now, there are some factual quibbles I could
offer here. The Lackawanna case has been widely criticized as
government overkill, and Bush is being disingenuous when he says that
"[e]very action being taken against terrorists requires court
order." In fact, the Patriot Act allows agents to obtain subpoenas in
terrorist cases - which are very broadly defined - from so-called
FISA judges, whose discretion over whether to grant those subpoenas
is far more limited than in normal criminal cases. Moreover, under
the Patriot Act, someone served with a subpoena - say, a librarian or
bookstore owner told to turn over a patron's records - may not
challenge the search or even tell anyone about it.
But what really struck me about Bush's answer
was the narcissism he displayed: You don't have to worry about the
Patriot Act because I don't feel that it abridges your rights;
because I wouldn't have signed it if I thought it did; because I, the
president, would never allow that to happen. This is
personalizing policy to a truly uncomfortable degree, and it's the
subject of an
excellent cover piece (sub. req.) in
last week's New Republic by Noam Scheiber.
Scheiber's argument is that Bush isn't so
much ideologically driven as he is motivated by a deep-seated need to
see himself as the hero of his own narrative. Since he has surrounded
himself with right-wing advisers, he has become a right-winger by
going along with their narrative. Scheiber writes:
Conventional wisdom holds that the
president is a conservative hard-liner bent on upending the Middle
East and the U.S. tax code. But, while those may be the practical
implications of the decisions he's made as president, the way
George W. Bush makes sense of the world isn't through ideology.
It's through narrative. Bush has always been a sucker for a good
storyline - and never more so than when it involves him. In his
own mind, Bush is the central figure in an ever-unfolding series
of dramas. As such, Bush prides himself on possessing the
qualities of a hero: compassion and justness on the one hand;
boldness, principle, and resolution on the other. Bush almost
always supports policies that appear to reinforce this image of
himself; he opposes policies that appear to contradict it.
Make of this what you will, but I think
Scheiber's on to something: this is followership disguised as
leadership.
posted at 10:18 AM |
1 comments
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1 Comments:
Hey Dan:
Ever buy a "stock" but it actually is a limited partnership (have a ceremonial 1 share from the Celtics hanging around by chance). That $84 probably was reported as K-1 income - I'd say it's a stretch by Kerry for his point and Bush was on target to ridicule it. I doubt very much that BLS counts anyone getting K-1 income as a small business owner; otherwise this "statistic" would be utterly meaningless. Of course, I really hope they're not categorizing someone with $84 reported on their tax return as a small business owner, as then none of this data means a hoot.
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Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
