Truth - Al Franken [41]
It took the Bush campaign a total of zero days to announce that they were going to use the “nuisance” line as the basis of a campaign ad (“terrorism—a nuisance?!”).1 It took Bush one additional day to incorporate an attack on Kerry’s nuisance line in his stump speech. And in less than the seven minutes that it took President Bush to read The Pet Goat that fateful day three years before, the right-wing media swarm had engulfed the nation’s airwaves in a cloud of distortion.
Bill O’Reilly was taking a well-deserved break on October 11, so Fox News anchor Tony Snow was filling in on the Factor. “This morning,” Snow crowed, “the President pounced on a quote in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine where Senator Kerry called terrorists a nuisance.” When O’Reilly returned, he must have been furious. Because Snow had broken the cardinal rule of the No Spin Zone: no spinning.
Sean Hannity, who doesn’t bother pretending he has such a rule, outuglied Snow by a Fox News mile:
He is saying—these are his words, this is his little debate he’s had with himself—the fact that three thousand of our fellow citizens were slaughtered on 9/11—we’re supposed to believe that these terrorists are only a mere nuisance. Just a nuisance.
Hannity, as usual, was just cribbing from his father-figure Rush Limbaugh, who had spent the afternoon telling his audience that the nuisance quote meant, “John Kerry really doesn’t think three thousand Americans dead in one day is that big a deal.”
By the end of the campaign, voters had so internalized this smear that the vice president could score a huge round of laughter and applause by growling, “The American people understand there’s nothing nuisance-like, if you will, about the problems we’re having to deal with today.” Which in ordinary circumstances would have barely qualified as a point, let alone a crowd-pleaser.
“Nuisance” was just one of a series of shameless decontextualizations used to portray Kerry as a clueless nancy who would rather windsurf down the Seine than confront the terrorist menace head-on. Terms like “sensitive” and “global test” were deployed against Kerry with even less explanation of their original context than I am providing in this sentence, which is now coming to a close.
These attacks worked on two levels. The obvious level was the literal. If Kerry thought terrorism was just a nuisance, then he was obviously the wrong man to lead the fight against it. But there was another level. The subtext of the constant attacks on Kerry’s toughness was that the Bush team was tough and Kerry wasn’t. It’s what blogger Joshua Micah Marshall called the Republicans’ Bitch-Slap Theory of Electoral Politics. By slapping Kerry around continuously, the President was sending America the message that “Kerry is my bitch.” Kerry, by focusing on his positive, nuanced agenda (including a modest, but eminently sensible health care plan that involved the word “reinsurance”), rather than fighting back with equal or greater ferocity, was whispering the opposite message: “I am Bush’s bitch.” That’s not a very “war president” kind of thing to whisper.
Uh oh. John and Teresa are back. I sure hope they don’t see that last paragraph.
Hi, John. Hi, Teresa. How was New Hampshire? An extraordinary state? Yes, I agree. “Won’t take it for granite”? Ha, ha, ha. No, no, I understand. You won it in 2004, but nevertheless you won’t take it for granted in 2008. Yes. I know. New Hampshire’s the granite state. Thank you, Teresa.
Oh, the book? It’s going fine. I was just talking about how the campaign focused on a positive message. Yes, that was a mistake. That’s what I was saying. Right. I wouldn’t hire Shrum again either. No, not even for less money. I just wouldn’t hire him at all. Huh? Oh. Hmmm. Uh, sure you should run again. Wow. That’d be great.