Love Plane

John Kerry stopped by Nashville yesterday and today to address the national convention of the American Legion. Last night I had the opportunity to see him speak shortly after his plane landed.

There's some indefatigable ironic hipster impulse, some protective field of self-consciousness that kicks in every time I go to any event of this type. They're always at least a little surreal, especially during the long wait for the candidate to arrive. Milling about a hangar made the whole thing seem a little "Spinal Tap," although the cheery, inoffensive 70s R&B music piped over the loudspeakers was infinitely preferable to the frantically optimistic 80s power ballads that preceded John Edwards last February...

Once Kerry landed, though, the rally didn't disappoint. The host of veterans accompanying John Kerry included John Glenn, an unexpected surprise; I'm sure in two days I'll be seeing the commercials that claim he didn't actually orbit the Earth.

The most pleasant surprise of the evening, though, turned out to be Kerry himself. He's a much more passionate speaker in person than you would think from watching him on television. When I watched his convention acceptance speech, I thought he seemed unusually fired up; now I wonder if that's more his normal style, and if the "wooden" tag results from some failure to get that passion across television screens or just the media's propensity to pick a label and stick with it.

Apparently, Kerry's arrival in Nashville also marked the start of a shift in his campaign strategy, as he used his American Legion address today to articulate more pointed differences with Bush on Iraq and the war on terror. He also reiterated that for all of Bush's claims to have made America safer (well, when his appointees aren't claiming that more attacks are imminent and that we might need to push back elections) his policies have accomplished just the opposite. It looks like Kerry has learned the 2000 and 2002 lessons that if you try to make yourself indistinguishable from your opponents, you don't give the public any reason to choose you over them. Let's hope he continues to articulate his distinctive positions on the issues, and to fight back against the seemingly unending stream of deeply deceptive attack ads that the Republicans are throwing at him.

Comments

[Dave Van Domelen]

I'll go with "pick and stick" myself. All it takes is being a little reserved once in a while, not using homey dialect in your speeches, and you get tagged with the "wooden" epithet. Neither Kerry nor Gore is particularly stiff, but they got tarred with that brush and nothing they could do would remove the tarring. Even when Kerry does stuff like snowboarding, it's just dismissed as a calculated attempt to shake the image.

[Kevin J. Maroney]

What DVD said. Al Gore, especially after 1992, was to my eyes and ears a fairly vibrant speaker, not particularly stiff, but he remained The Wooden Man in the eyes of the press even long after it was clear that the public liked his speaking style (as demonstrated by the consistent huge surges in his poll standings whenever his speeches got national coverage).

Back in 2000, the press was whispering the idea that Gore should choose Kerry as his running mate because Kerry would bring charisma and a dynamic style to the campaign. But that was the Storyline for 2000; the Storyline for 2004 is completely different.

[Marc]

And completely the same. At least Kerry chose a running mate who is genuinely charismatic and dynamic - remember the fawning over Lieberman's purported sense of humor?

It's also interesting how, once Gore started criticizing Bush's war in Iraq, the label instantly shifted from "Wooden Al" to "Crazy Al."

As for homey dialect, it's interesting to watch Bush's labored (but effective) hominess fade when he gets worried. The 1992 "60 Minutes" interview Michael Moore used in "Fahrenheit 9-11" and the interview Bush gave last weekend both show him deeply rattled and speaking in the twerpy tones of a rich kid from New England.

And it's scary that any of this might decide an election after four years of war, terrorism, and economic freefall.

[Kevin J. Maroney]

I read Marc Crispin Miller's The Bush Dyslexicon a year or so back. His premise is that W. Bush speaks freely and easily when he talks about things he geniunely cares about--baseball, war, executing prisoners--and stumbles all over himself when he has to discuss things he doesn't understand or doesn't want to say--expressing compassion for the poor, extending thanks to other nations, that type of thing. While I thought Miller overstated his case, I thought he was on to a nugget of truth. And Charles Pierce, writing on Tapped this morning about last night's speech, points out the pattern again.

[John Pistelli]

I also saw Kerry in person once and had the same experience you describe. I think some of his stiff image has to do with media idiocy, but he has a genuine warmth and liveliness that just doesn't come across on TV for some reason.

Also, I recommend both The Bush Dyslexicon and Miller's second book, Cruel and Unusual. I wish they weren't marketed as just more Bush-bashing books because they're very intelligent, provocative analyses of the entire far right mentality.

[Kan Mattoo]

I just wish he wasn't doing everything possible to lose this election.

I'm starting to hate the man.

[Marc]

I'm starting to wonder what Kerry can do to respond to the Republicans' attacks, if the media continues to assume its mission of "objectivity" means reporting even the most blatantly false accusations as if they're true in good old he-said she-said fashion.

Reporting every political story as a process story obliterates any distinctions between true claims and false ones; it also places more attention on the interests of the political class (politics as handicapping and horse-racing) than on the issues at stake in this election - issues on which I think Kerry is generally more in step with the American people.

[Kan Mattoo]

Well, instead of coming out and railing on the charges against him, he could actually talk about the differences. I've seen a bunch of his speeches, including the midnight one after the RNC, and they are rarely about what he will do differently in particulars.

I'm beyond Nam. I wish Kerry would stop talking about it and allowing himself to get dragged into that argument.

We all know he served and Cheney didn't and Bush was in the National Guard. We got it.

Tell us about your health care idea. Tell us about the tax cuts for corps, small businesses, and how your plan is going to bring back jobs.

Instead:

Vietnam.

[Marc]

To some extent I don't think he can help but talk about his Vietnam record as long as the Swift Boat people are out there spreading blatant lies about it; in fact, a lot of people are saying he should have responded faster.

On the other hand, maybe at some point you have to recognize that the story has saturated as far as it can go, your own response has done the same, and it's time to move on.

I think it's also a question of what gets covered and how people choose to spin it - I mean, it's not like Bush has been dealing in specifics either, and he's had four years to show us how he would (or wouldn't) bring back the jobs he's lost. But "doesn't go into particulars" is another one of those tags that gets hung on Kerry alone.

[Kan Mattoo]

That's fine, respond faster. That's it. Look at Clinton's advice: talk about the economy, the war in iraq....get away from Vietnam...

Neither candidate is going on issues. That's a big problem...however, Kerry is the challenger...he's got to show why he's beliefs are better for the US.

[Marc]

Absolutely. Running on "character" hands the advantage to the Republicans, even when the Democratic candidate has a better character to run on, as John Kerry certainly does over George W. Bush, because it's Republican voters who most care about "character" and Republican politicians who have most claimed it as their own.

Joan Didion writes brilliantly about how this stalled Al Gore's 2000 campaign in Political Fictions, linked over in the sidebar.