NEW YORK — Look at it this way: There are surely 16-year-olds, smart
kids of the present and community leaders-to-be, who will read this and other
accounts of the great Watershed Election of 2004 and who know, vaguely or
even with some precise detail, that there are resemblances between this year’s
presidential election and the one that occurred in 1988, the year of their birth.
They will know the saga of Michael
Dukakis, a Democratic son of Massachusetts, who tried to run for president
on competence and ended up being tagged with the opposite of that, who was
opposed by a Republican named George Bush,
a man so bumbling that a national magazine slugged one of its cover stories
about him with the line “Fighting the Wimp
Factor” but who somehow became endowed with credible heroic swagger while
the Democrat experienced the erosion of his own. These precocious readers will
know that the Democratic candidate of their birth year got slammed, like the party
standard-bearer of 2004, by an outlaw smear campaign — the infamous Willie Horton
ads in Dukakis’ case, the swift-boat calumnies in
John Kerry‘s — and they will mutter, like so many of their elders,
imprecations against these malefactors of great
wealth who would do something so dire against a man so pure and deserving.
And, if Democratic partisans they are, they may read these resemblances to
the past as auguries of the future, signs of a defeat to come, and curse the fates.
But the more discerning among them may say, “Hey, they did it to themselves!”
And these will be your valedictorians.
For, like Michael Dukakis, who in a debate with the elder
George Bush, answered too placidly a question about the hypothetical rape of his
own wife, Senator Kerry has let some questions go begging too.
Could he really have been so foolish, as former New York mayor
Rudy Giuliani claimed in his Monday-night speech to
the Republican convention crowd at Madison Square Garden, as to have called the
Israeli wall now under construction on the West Bank a “barrier to peace” while later
approving it as a legitimate act of self-defense? If so, then he thereby
stepped unsuspectingly into the pair of flip-flops which the opposition had obligingly
set aside for him. (A pair of bona fide
“Kerry flip-flops,” bearing the candidate’s face
on the heel, was included in the goodie kit handed out to GOP delegates arriving
here on the weekend.)
In this case, Kerry’s apparent waffling, no doubt designed to cover both
bases, may have ended by covering none. It did not prevent actor
Ron Silver, reportedly motivated in large part by his
concern for Israel, from serving as leadoff man Monday night in the series of
high-profile extollers of Bush the wise warrior
and statesman. The attack of September 11th, said Silver, was an infamy “we
cannot forget, we cannot forgive, we cannot excuse,” and like the president, he
embraced the concept of a greater War on Terror expanded to include the war
in Iraq. Said Silver, to thunderous applause: “The president is doing exactly the
right thing!”
And Silver, the same Ron Silver who was last seen carrying a torch for
Democrat Bill Bradley in the early primaries of 2000, went on to intone the name of
his endorsee, “George W. Bush,” to an
even greater ovation.
He was followed by Arizona senator John
McCain, who had so recently been the subject of Kerry’s public courtship as
a potential running mate and bridge to the opposition. He who seemed more
than willing of a sudden to put aside his
differences with Bush — including whatever resentment remained from a slander
campaign directed against McCain by Bush supporters during the 2000 South
Carolina primary. The president’s goals in Iraq were “necessary, achievable, and
noble,” said McCain, who scored rhetorical
points against the attending Michael Moore,
a “disingenuous filmmaker” whose hugely successful
Fahrenheit 9/11, a cinematic philippic against the war, is now
beginning to seem as dated as the celebrity of erstwhile national-security
whistleblower Richard Clarke.
Much of the reason for that change in the political weather —
a minute but growing one that polls were beginning to chart even before the
convention started — could be attributed not to the meretricious contentions of
the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth about Kerry’s war record but to the
Democratic nominee’s own caution two weeks ago, when he fell into a trap set by Bush
and defended his 2002 vote for the Iraq war. He would do it again, Kerry had
said, even if he had known there were no weapons of mass destruction (WMD,
in the now clich«½d acronym) or any evidence of collaboration between Iraqi
dictator Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
With that, Democrats all over America surely bit their lips to keep from
uttering Dick Cheney‘s favorite action
verb/expletive. Some half a million people snaked through the streets of Manhattan on
Sunday to indicate their dissatisfaction with the Bush administration, and an
enormous percentage of them were motivated by
their hatred of the Bush policy in Iraq. As was true of Vietnam more than a
generation ago, a military conflict was both a red
flag in itself and a convenient symbol of other discontents.
And now Kerry had basically eighty-sixed the whole controversy to —
what? Avoid controversy? If so, he had failed. And his decision to drape last month’s
Democratic convention in Boston in Vietnam-shaded mufti while surrounding
himself with ex-Navy crewmates as a trope for his candidacy had backfired. For most of
the time since, the decorated veteran had been on the defensive about his military
service, and, at best, it had been neutralized as
an issue that could work for him.
So much had it been done away with that former New York mayor
Rudy Giuliani in his overlong but effective oration now felt entitled, in an
otherwise scornful series of references to Kerry,
to damn the Democrat with faint praise. “I respect him for his service to the
nation,” Giuliani said, and Kerry actually got
a round of the kind of polite applause that runners-up — in a word, losers — get
at post-election affairs conducted by the winners. As much as anything
critical that was said of him — and there was much of that — the condescension
toward Kerry was devastating.
It may also be premature, of course. Kerry is no flash in the pan, and
he didn’t get where he is today without experiencing some cliffhanging moments,
times when he was left for dead politically. He survived a couple of close elections,
closing fast to win them, and surely no one needs to be reminded of what
happened in Iowa back in January when the senator actually managed to come from back
in the pack to victory with a few weeks’ worth of intensified campaigning.
He is, after all, a genuine military hero, not a funny little man posing atop a
tank or a reservist mugging in a flight suit
aboard a warship. Those who doubt his valor may end up being disabused of their
complacency. And, for all the glow of their opening night in New York, which
borrowed something (as was surely the plan) from the still unspeakable grief of 9/11 and
focused on the achievements of the nation’s military, the Republicans might still
have a chore on their hands cleaning up the president’s latest verbal upchucks — his
description of the outcome in Iraq as a “catastrophic victory” and his declaration to
an interviewer that the United States could not “win” the War on Terror.
It would surely be an irony in this nip-and-tuck presidential race if the
incumbent should now have to do what his challenger did: spend a month or so
explaining himself to voters who would seem to have more than a normal
share of skepticism toward both contenders.
