BY DAN
KENNEDY
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Monday, October 11, 2004
TERRORISM, CHEEZ WHIZ, AND THE
VIRTUES OF NUANCE. Matt Bai has an excellent analysis of
John
Kerry's anti-terrorism policy
in the current New York Times Magazine. But perhaps what's
most fascinating about it is Bai's sense (he doesn't have much in the
way of hard evidence, but I suspect he's right) that Kerry himself is
wary of talking much about it for fear of being further labeled as a
weak-willed - yes, you guessed it - flip-flopper.
Such is the state of the political
dialogue these days. The Republicans put out the word that Kerry is a
weathervane, the media pick up on it, and, finally, the candidate
himself is stuck with slogans that he probably doesn't fully accept
(such as the "war" on terror) for fear of being misunderstood and
lampooned.
Based on the very directly stated
views of Kerry's likely secretary of state, Richard Holbrooke ("We're
not in a war on terror, in the literal sense. The war on terror is
like saying 'the war on poverty.' It's just a metaphor. What we're
really talking about is winning the ideological struggle so that
people stop turning themselves into suicide bombers.") and on Kerry's
own lengthy, if indirect, comments, Bai deduces that Kerry's
principal weapon against Al Qaeda will be the sort of international
policing efforts he's been talking about for years, long before 9/11.
Bai writes:
Kerry's view, that the
21st century will be defined by the organized world's struggle
against agents of chaos and lawlessness, might be the beginning of
a compelling vision. The idea that America and its allies, sharing
resources and using the latest technologies, could track the
movements of terrorists, seize their bank accounts and carry out
targeted military strikes to eliminate them, seems more optimistic
and more practical than the notion that the conventional armies of
the United States will inevitably have to punish or even invade
every Islamic country that might abet radicalism.
And yet, you can understand why
Kerry has been so tentative in advancing this idea. It's
comforting to think that Al Qaeda might be as easily marginalized
as a bunch of drug-running thugs, that an "effective" assault on
its bank accounts might cripple its twisted campaign against
Americans. But Americans are frightened - an emotion that has
benefited Bush, and one that he has done little to dissuade - and
many of them perceive a far more existential threat to their lives
than the one Kerry describes. In this climate, Kerry's rather dry
recitations about money-laundering laws and intelligence-sharing
agreements can sound oddly discordant. We are living at a time
that feels historically consequential, where people seem to expect
- and perhaps deserve - a theory of the world that matches the
scope of their insecurity.
Theoretically, Kerry could still
find a way to wrap his ideas into some bold and cohesive construct
for the next half-century - a Kerry Doctrine, perhaps, or a
campaign against chaos, rather than a war on terror - that people
will understand and relate to. But he has always been a man who
prides himself on appreciating the subtleties of public policy,
and everything in his experience has conditioned him to avoid
unsubtle constructs and grand designs. His aversion to Big Think
has resulted in one of the campaign's oddities: it is Bush, the
man vilified by liberals as intellectually vapid, who has emerged
as the de facto visionary in the campaign, trying to impose some
long-term thematic order on a dangerous and disorderly world,
while Kerry carves the globe into a series of discrete problems
with specific solutions.
For a better understanding of the
intellectually impoverished landscape on which this campaign is being
fought, have a look at Jonathan
Chait's cover story (sub.
req.) in the current New Republic. Chait observes that Kerry
is hardly unique in being labeled a "flip-flopper" - that the
Republicans also used it to considerable effect against Bill Clinton
in 1992 (and, to a lesser extent, in '96) and against Al Gore in
2000.
Chait argues that the
"flip-flopper" label is a natural consequence of Clinton's having
taken some of the Republicans' favorite issues off the table, such as
welfare reform, taxes, the military, and crime. All the Republicans
really had left at that point was to claim that Clinton/Gore/Kerry
have switched so profoundly on the issues that they don't have the
character to be president. Yet as Chait notes, the notion that Kerry
has flip-flopped more than George W. Bush has is absurd. Bush has
been for and against abortion rights, for and against a Department of
Homeland Security, for and against the formation of the 9/11
Commission, even for and against letting national-security adviser
Condoleezza Rice testify before Congress. Chait writes:
The alleged character
flaws of whomever the Democrats nominate for president change from
election to election. But the charge of flip-flopping always plays
a central role for a very important reason: It's the natural parry
to the Democrats' post-Clinton centrism. The moderation that has
characterized the Democratic Party since Clinton has the natural
advantage of avoiding unpopular stances. It also has two
disadvantages. First, as the party has shifted right, it has
forced Democrats in its mainstream to shift along with it. (Hence
Kerry's flip-flop on the death penalty.)
Second, New Democrat-style
centrism saddles its adherents with positions that straddle the
political divide. Kerry supported developing missile defense but
not deploying it immediately; he supported NAFTA, which had labor
and environmental provisions, but opposed a trade bill that did
not. When your position on many issues is "neither too much nor
too little," you can appear inconsistent even if you're not. Sure,
it doesn't help that Kerry has trouble explaining himself. But
even a gifted communicator like Clinton, remember, was widely seen
as a waffler.
So why does the label stick to
Democrats but not Republicans? Chait argues that it's got a lot to do
with the Republicans' superior skills at media manipulation - at
establishing a narrative for which the press, ever hungry for
perceived character flaws, is all too eager to fill in the details.
Chait revisits Kerry's encounter with Cheez Whiz to illuminating
effect, noting how much more that seemed to resonate than did another
incident in which Bush got peeved at an underling for eating his
peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich.
"One reason stories about Bush's
elitism don't receive the same attention as stories about Kerry's
elitism is that the model for the latter is far better entrenched,"
Chait writes. "This simply reflects one of the most tiresome habits
of the political media. Once a narrative template has been
established, nearly any fact can be wedged into it."
As Chait further observes, this is
a pretty pathetic way to choose a president.
posted at 1:37 PM |
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1 Comments:
In one respect I found Bai's article laughable--he treats the Bush Regime's one note, sound bite friendly, ultra-simplistic approach to terror issues as if it were some well thought out grand strategy, equally worthy of respect and consideration to Kerry's (should I say it?) more nuanced approach.
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Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
