The best part of John Kerry’s appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart was Kerry’s pre-emptive strike against the “Dubya can’t debate” strategy of Karl Rove. Jon asks John about the upcoming debates and the conventional wisdom that he’d just cream George. John says, completely straight (and long) faced, “George Bush is a good debater.”
Jon froze a moment, as did the crowd, perhaps unsure whether we just saw an embarrassing gaffe — a wooden neo-Gore blowing an anti-Bush joke in front of the young eager liberal crowd he’s trying to win over.
Then Kerry delivers the punch line: “The president has won every debate he’s ever had,” Kerry said. “He beat Ann Richards. He beat Al Gore. So, he’s a good debater.”
I hope the sound of the bar being raised doesn’t scare Bush. You’re the incumbent president of the United States. You don’t get the free pass this time. You don’t get credit for just “not looking terrible”. Now try and weasel out of these upcoming debates.
But I know I’m also going to hear “”I’ve flip-flopped, flap-flipped” on some campaign ad. I wanted to see him get through the night with not one sound byte or image that could be taken out-of-context, like another Dean scream or Dukakis tank. I think that was the one they’ll run with.
Kerry should have watched some clips of Joe Biden on the Daily Show. Biden knows how to work that situation. When Kerry started going into the campaign rote of “this many jobs lost, that many insurance blah blah blah” it fed into the Rove plan of painting Kerry as wishy-washy, flippity-floppity, dare we say nuanced (so French!) leader who’ll mess up the war by thinking instead of shooting.
What I wanted Kerry to do was to go into Joe Biden Rant Mode where he’ll start with a couple of stats, quickly rushing through them, get visibly annoyed and say, “look, we can go over all of the evidence, it just plainly spells out that the Bush Administration is doing a terrible job of running our country. Look around. Read the paper. Google it. Know a soldier in Iraq? Lost a job overseas? Got health insurance? Own a house? Can you afford your prescription medicine? How’s your retirement portfolio? What did you buy with that Bush Tax Cut? Do you think a lot of the world hates us right now? Why is that? Do you really think the depravity of character displayed at Abu Ghraib prison was really just ‘a few bad apples’?” (Perhaps it’s a good thing I’m not a candidate’s media advisor.)
Top that off with, “look, George Bush doesn’t want to talk about what he was doing 25, 35 years ago, and neither do I. Let’s talk about today and tomorrow. Is this how we’re going to quench our addiction to oil, by stomping around the Middle East and blowing things up? Is this how we’re going to fight terrorism, by letting Osama get away while we fight Middle Eastern wars virtually alone? We can build a technological marvel like the internet, we can talk about manned missions to Mars, but we can’t build a large comfortable car that get 40 miles-per-gallon? We can’t invest in energy technology? I just don’t believe that.”
I think overall that Kerry’s appearance was good. Let’s give it a “B-“. It’s no Clinton on Arsenio Hall’s show moment, but it’s not Nixon on Laugh-In, either. I think younger people in America might see Kerry as Good Hearted Dad who’s Tragically Unhip. He snowboards, wind-surfs, and plays ice hockey. The other guy falls off his mountain bike. Who does the X-Games crowd vote for?
“Radical” Russ — I’m also eagerly awaiting the John Edwards: Trial Lawyer! Strategy from the Karl Rove Kamp… Followed by the This was the little girl whose intestines were sucked out by a jacuzzi pump, John Edwards fought for her ad…
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