DEAD PARROT BULLETIN, 2/15/04

EN ROUTE TO THE CORONATION

The events of past month--Dean's implosion, Kerry's phoenix-like rise from the ashes of a failed campaign, the panicky White House efforts at damage-control as the administration's policies unravel--have been almost overwhelming in their speed and intensity, and it is far too soon to say what they portend. Still, we should probably try to make some sense of them before the next wave washes over us.

Both those who had adopted Dean as their man and those who had withheld a decision but respected him for having put a little lead in the Democrats' droopy pencil undoubtedly feel cheated of a good fight by the suddenness and completeness of his collapse. Since many primary voters seem to have chosen on the basis of perceived electability, we ought to ask how that perception formed and how accurate it was. Was Dean in fact a sure loser in November, or was he the victim of a decision by the corporate media and the right wing that his unelectability should become self-fulfilling prophecy?

How savagely Dean would have been targeted if he had gone further is evident from a TV ad that the Club for Growth ran in Iowa before the caucuses (Boston Globe, 1/7/04). The "Club," which distinguished itself last year with attack ads on Republican senators who merely sought to limit the size of Bush's tax cut (see Dead Parrot #22), unleashed every rancid stereotype in its arsenal against Dean. In the ad, a man leaving a barber shop is asked what he thinks of "Howard Dean's plans to raise taxes on families by $1900 a year." The reply: "I think Howard Dean should take his tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading..." At this point the man's wife jumps in to complete the sentence: "...body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show back to Vermont where it belongs." Like the Superbowl ad in which a dog clamps its jaws on a man's crotch to make him relinquish a beer bottle (and unlike MoveOn's poignant and understated critique of the Bush deficits), the Club's exercise in rational discussion of the issues was deemed eminently airworthy. (People who actually read the Times during this period would have found the paper of record slipping a subtler shiv into Dean's back in the form of articles and commentaries on his marriage: a kinky one, in that his wife insists on dressing like a frump and prefers practicing as a doctor to joining him on the hustings in the manner of Pat Nixon or Mamie Eisenhower.)

Whatever we make of Dean--and it is hard to escape the conclusion that his fall was in part a punishment for speaking the truth, or at least for speaking it too loudly and too insistently--he and his freak show will be packing up their Volvos and hitting road to Vermont after he loses, for the 17th consecutive time, in Wisconsin on Tuesday. His departure leaves us with John Kerry, and we'd better get used to it. Kerry has a lot to answer for, including not only his tortured equivocations about the war in Iraq but also his backing of NAFTA and welfare "reform" and other neolib policies of the Clinton years. In Dead Parrot's opinion, however, we had better refrain from pushing these points until after he has been inaugurated next January. As Noam Chomsky, whose critique of the American establishment to which Bush and Kerry both belong could hardly be sharper, pointed out at a forum in Milton last week, our political spectrum is pathetically narrow--but still wide enough to provide grounds for a real and urgent choice between its left and right ends.

Despite his baggage and his inexplicably slow start in the presidential race, Kerry is a proven campaigner who showed in his senate contest against the popular governor Bill Weld in 1996 that he can take a punch and fight back with tenacity and discipline. Though he is as cerebral as Al Gore and about as stiff, Democrats are rallying to his combative streak, which promises that he will not let the inevitable smears and distortions by Team Bush go unchallenged. In the primaries, the turnouts in themselves have been thrilling evidence of the interest people feel in sending Bush to early retirement. The Times reported this morning that one district in Nevada had ten times its usual number for yesterday's caucus.

That Kerry will need every ounce of resilience and every ounce of animus he possesses is not in doubt. Rove's operatives, along with troops of voluntary surrogates, are already in the field, and if John McCain's experience in South Carolina in 2000 is any indication, the closer things get, the likelier it will be that Kerry is found to have sired a platoon of illegitimate babies of color. Meanwhile, his well-attested peacenik tendencies are to be exploited. The Wall Street Journal's indefatigable editorialists have taken him to task for, among other acts of treason, opposing the glorious invasion of Grenada in 1983; and (the three Purple Hearts aside) his record on Vietnam is what Dick Nixon used to refer to as "squishy soft." Not only did he speak out against the war after he returned to the States, but he did so in the company of the Benedict Arnold of her time, Jane Fonda. Or at least, in one photo circulating on the Internet, he is visible, slightly blurred and three rows behind Fonda, at a protest rally. When this picture seemed a bit too...tame, someone evidently reasoned that just as Trotsky was made to disappear from old portraits of the Politburo, Hanoi Jane could be made to appear in places she had never been. Et voila--young John Kerry, giving a speech all by himself in Mineola, NY, in 1971, suddenly has the great traitress at his elbow. (The Times, 2/14, shows both the original and the doctored versions of the shot.)

There will be much more of this sort of thing, both in images and in words. One of the more ludicrous talking points that the Republicans have begun talking up is that Kerry is a captive of "special interests." This canard would be less funny (Kerry has taken a lot of money from lobbyists) if it were not being floated out there by the beneficiaries of Enron, Halliburton, and Diebold. Yes, that Diebold--the touch-screen, no-paper-trail voting machine company.

Many twists and turns await us between now and November. The press, which has awakened from its three-year snooze long enough to feign surprise at the fact that there are no WMD in Iraq and to peer deferentially at the records of Bush's truncated National Guard service, will not sustain the narrative of the President on the Ropes and will follow it, as fairness and balance require, with the narrative of the President Resurrected and perhaps several other narratives after that. What we have to do is make sure that the story ends in the right place. Today, for the first time in quite a while, there is reason to think that it might.

BEST LINE OF THE WEEK

In a brilliant op-ed piece on the gay marriage controversy (Globe, 2/14), Bill Maher writes: "Half the people who pledge eternal love are doing it because one of them is either knocked up, rich or desperate, but in George Bush's mind, marriage is only a beautiful lifetime bond of love and sharing--kind of like what his Dad has with the Saudis."