The Republicans are not only running scared toward their fundamentalist base, as I noted last week, but theyre running Orwellian and courting embarrassment.
For the next eight months, as they face off against the weathered campaigner John Kerry, its a safe guess that the Bush-Cheney team will run on both aboveboard themes and underground rumbles.
The main aboveboard note will be a confidence game: Vote for this man because hes a wartime chief and hes confident, so you cant lose. One of the Republican ads released the day after Kerrys Super Tuesday triumphs features Bush repeating one phrase four times: I know. I know exactly where I want to lead this country, etc.
The Republican hope, of course, is that this mantra of obdurate omniscience will drown out the sizeable uncertainties to come among them, the report on September 11 to be issued in July by an independent commission that Bush cannot take for granted; the ongoing travails in Iraq; and chiefly, the countrys economic future.
On the latter subject, one straightforward embarrassment this week fell from the lips of Dick Cheney, the usually guarded indeed, sequestered vice president. The very sight of Cheney sitting still for reportorial questions, however perfunctory they may be, is unusual, but the night of Super Tuesday Cheney was unveiled for three cable network interviews.
He should have gotten by unfazed. Reporters tend to tiptoe around Cheney. (NBCs Tim Russert helpfully volunteered last year that when Cheney told him that Saddam Hussein had reconstituted nuclear weapons, what he meant was nuclear weapons programs.) Unlike Bush, who seems to know less than he says, the tight-lipped Cheney seems to know more. Hes been in and around power so long the better part of thirty years that he wears a professional air.
Reporters who get near him are so excited about having landed him, they shy away from everything but the obvious. On this occasion, corporate synergy went AWOL when Russert failed to ask Cheney about an NBC report into a terrorist camp in Northern Iraq. The camp is run by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian considered by Cheney (having trouble getting his line straight) the man who probably launched possibly the horrendous attacks on Shiites in Baghdad and Karbala. Several times before the Iraq war, the camp was in the Pentagons sights. But al-Zarqawi and co. escaped unscathed.
According to NBCs correspondent, after three strenuous debates in 2002 and 2003, the National Security Council decided to pass up an attack. Bushs Ahabian obsession with Saddam Hussein was to blame. In the words of former National Security Council member Roger Cressey. People were more obsessed with developing the coalition to overthrow Saddam than to execute the presidents policy of preemption against terrorists.
But Cheney was risible when tossed softball questions about the economy. The man from Halliburton is so remote from American life that he could declare that the the economy is in very good shape and that the national unemployment rate of 5.6 percent is not bad. In the course of his chat with MSNBC, Cheney declared: If the Democratic policies had been pursued over the last two or three years, the kind of tax increases that both Kerry and Edwards have talked about, we would not have had the kind of job growth that weve had.
But the kind of job growth that weve had lands on the wrong side of zero. For the first time since Herbert Hoover, a President has seen over a net loss of jobs. Many of the newly unemployed reside in Midwestern states teetering on an electoral knife-edge. With that kind of achievement to crow about, Bush-Cheneys at risk of the other crow-related metaphor: eating it.
Meanwhile, on the subterranean side, the murky caverns where the turbid waters of Matt Drudge feed Rush Limbaugh, the Rev. Sun Myung Moons Washington Times and Rupert Murdochs muddy streams, the Republicans are trundling out variations on what promises to be a major theme against John Kerry: hes not really American.
Here, its the undercurrents that count. A peculiar item sprang up on the Republican website this week: JOHN KERRY: INTERNATIONAL MAN OF MYSTERY.
This odd headline comes with a photo of Kerry holding a guitar! So the Massachusetts liberal is that ur-hippy alien prototype, a folk singer! In fact, Kerrys a spare-time classical guitarist, which to the sort of heartland voter the Republicans long to turn out is probably worse.
The headline is all the odder when you look at the items that follow: Kerry Claimed Bush Administration Delayed Libya Deal For Political Gain, Kerry Cited Friends In The British Government as Source, Kerry Floats Stories That Bush Administration Helped Overthrow Haitian President Jean Bertrand Aristide, In October 2003, Kerry Claimed Bush Administration Rebuffed French-Russian Offer To Prevent War.
So Kerry has foreign connections. He gets around. He talks to Kofi Annan. Hes a rootless cosmopolite. He talks to people who talk to people. And worse: John Kerrys Conspiracies Are Not New.
Were a few inches away from his grandfather was Jewish. (Which is true. So is his brother, who is a convert.)
Last year, around the time when the House of Representatives cafeteria renamed French fries freedom fries, a Bush adviser said about Kerry: he looks French. (In fact, Kerry has French relatives.) In the subterranean Republican world of implication and innuendo, enough said. Since Bush cannot outperform Kerry in military service, expect to see more of this sort of thing.
