JOHN Podhoretz predicts that Dubya will win a "substantial" victory in November because John Kerry is "a terrible, terrible, terrible candidate". Predicting the future is risky business, and weather forecasters can't seem to get three days in a row right. But Podhoretz apparently hopes for a "self-fulfilling prophecy", that is, that by making a prediction, he and the other right-wingers who utter that prediction will influence voters by making them believe that Kerry will lose, so they should not join the losing side but stay home or vote for Nader.
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Will it work? Who knows. Kerry IS an extremely bad candidate, but, mirabile dictu, he kept winning primaries anyway. Dubya, by contrast, is a fair to middling candidate, which is why he was chosen by the Republican power elite to be their poster boy in the first place. Let's be clear here: George W. Bush, like Ronald Reagan before him, is President in name only. He controls nothing but is controlled by a collective leadership, a right-wing cabal that needed a pretty face to front for its ugly policies.
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Dubya is pretty - as all major candidates must be pretty in a country where more women than men vote. And because that's true, Kerry is also pretty, in a craggy sort of way. This is, then, a beauty contest, in which the candidate who makes more women's hearts go pit-a-pat will win, unless Kerry gets tough on the one issue people care about more than any other. He could simply reassert the 1992 Clinton maxim: "It's the economy, stupid", because the economy is, once again, a mess, thanks to the total economic mismanagement the Republicans are notorious for.
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Or he could go riskier, but even closer to the truth: "It's economic fairness, stupid." He could point out that since the Plutocratic Revolution of 1986, fronted for by the imitation-President Ronald Reagan but really run by many of the same people who now run the imitation-presidency of George Dubya Bush, there has been a stark reconcentration of obscene wealth in fewer and fewer hands, while the middle class and poor have lost ground. Kerry could talk about the crushing, life-draining burden of debt in people's lives, not just the burden to future generations of the national debt that the Reaganites and Bush the Elder quadrupled (!) and Bush the Younger threatens to double again (so that it would be 8 TIMES what it started as in 1980, before Reagan) -- whereas the Democrats under Clinton produced a massive surplus that could have paid down the national debt, maybe even paid it off entirely.
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No, Kerry needs to talk about personal debt and the hopelessness of tens or scores of millions of Americans trying to cope with usurious interest rates charged by the obscenely rich that make it impossible for ordinary people to get out of debt. He needs to focus on "default rates" of 27%, and about late fees, overlimit fees, ATM fees that raise the effective rate of interest even higher -- and which are treated as loans on which even more interest is charged!
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He needs to say he will restore the tax-deductibility of consumer interest, so that the little guy can write off the hundreds and hundreds or even thousands of dollars in interest he pays each and every year to the rich who own credit-card and loan companies. Such interest used to be tax-deductible, until Ronald Reagan, the smiling face of evil, got Congress to take away the deductibility of the interest the little guy pays, while preserving the deductibility of the interest the rich pay, mortgage interest on up to two "homes", one of which can be a sleepover yacht!
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But, as I say, this course is risky, because Kerry's own family is very rich. He has millions, and his wife has hundreds of millions of dollars. But John F. Kennedy was very rich too. He 'betrayed his class' by proposing fairness and opportunity for the little guy, and was loved by the Nation - tho hated intensely by the retrograde few. John F. Kerry is proud that his own initials match those of Kennedy. But does he have the stuff that Kennedy had? Time will tell.
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Miserable a candidate tho he be, I have to vote for Kerry, as tens of millions of other Americans have to vote for him, and forget a protest vote for the best man in the contest, Ralph Nader. Because it is urgently important to get rid of George W. Bush, the man who gave us 9/11, an illegal and ever-costlier Iraq war, an economy where the best jobs are being sent to India, and a national debt that is rising at the rate of $500 billion a year for programs that are doing nothing to bring the economy out of depression. (Responsive to "John Kerry's Quiet Collapse", April 27, 2004)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 10:37 AM