Truth - Al Franken [40]
I know what you’re thinking. Kerry didn’t have negative things to say about Bush. But you’re wrong. According to an unpublished study by Franken et al, there were 9.7 times as many bad things to say about Bush as there were about Kerry. For example, Bush lied us into war.
Don’t misunderstand me. There’s nothing inherently wrong with a negative ad. It’s part of the rough-and-tumble of American politics. I myself sometimes use negativity in order to make a political point or just to defame Bill O’Reilly.
But there is something wrong with a negative ad that, in addition to being negative, lies. I’m not a big fan of lies. I object to them on principle.
This isn’t an exercise in “gotcha” journalism, like my last book. No, I’ve debunked the preceding anti-Kerry smears, and will debunk a few more, in order to demonstrate an actual point. A point foreshadowed in the first chapter, “Election Day.” Bush did not win a mandate for his policies. The country is not more conservative now than it was in the nineties or when Bush lost in 2000. In addition to the powerful specter of Bush’s Little Black Dress, Kerry lost, in part, because the electorate was made to believe a raft of wildly untrue things about his character, his personal history, and his policies.
One of the best ways to minimize the power of such attacks is to say one thing about yourself and your opponent and stick to it. George “Vote for Me or Die” Bush did a helluva job on that score. So did Bill “It’s the Economy, Stupid” Clinton. Another technique, pioneered by “Silent Cal” Coolidge in the little-remembered 1924 campaign, is to avoid saying anything at all. But Kerry didn’t use either technique. Unfortunately, Kerry spoke not in sound bites, not even in sentences, but in paragraphs—richly textured paragraphs, paragraphs laden with dependent clauses, abstruse qualifications, and exotic punctuation, like semicolons; em-dashes—and even the occasional interbang. Why in God’s name did he do that?!
He had been in the Senate, the world’s greatest deliberative body, for twenty years. But that’s not where it came from. No, the problem arose when he was very young—when he started to display an interest in the world around him and a tendency to think through complex problems in a thoughtful way. How the Democratic Party ever allowed itself to nominate such a person continues to mystify me. Still, he was our candidate.
As Kerry himself knew, the Bushies stood ready to pounce on anything that Kerry said—in public or private, even to himself—and fashion it into a crude shiv with which to stab him in the back, neck, and face. That’s why, when he sat down with Matt Bai of The New York Times Magazine to discuss his foreign policy views, Kerry seemed to regard the interview as, Bai wrote, “an invitation to do himself harm.”
But once Kerry got going, he opened up and made the mistake of saying something that was perfectly reasonable but also, in the context of a campaign against an utterly shameless liar, dangerously misquotable. Read what Bai wrote, and see if you can find the word that the Bush smear artists zeroed in on:
When I asked Kerry what it would take for Americans to feel safe again, he displayed a much less apocalyptic worldview. “We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they’re a nuisance,” Kerry said. “As a former law-enforcement person, I know we’re never going to end prostitution. We’re never going to end illegal gambling. But we’re going to reduce it, organized crime, to a level where it isn’t on the rise. It isn’t threatening people’s lives every day, and fundamentally, it’s something that you continue to fight, but it’s not threatening the fabric of your life.”
If you chose anything other than “nuisance,” you obviously don’t have what it takes to rise through the ranks of the Republican hate machine. I’m sorry. But it’s better that I tell you now than your having to find out the hard way. The way I did.
If, on the other hand, you guessed that the Bushies