20 years in the Senate and…
It is hot and humid in New Jersey as it can only be in mid-summer. It makes for great produce: tomatoes, cucumbers, corn, but it makes any intellectual work like quarrying marble with a tea spoon.
Still I find myself, even when watching the Phillies snap their 5 game losing streak by beating the Cubs, digesting a week of the DNC and especially John Kerry.
It is interesting the way his supporters defend him when asked about his virtually non-existent Senate record.
Rep Barney Frank said that he did outstanding work as a prosecutor, about his work concerning money laundering and fisheries.
For some reason the “fisheries” part sticks in my brain. In 19 years what committees did he serve on? What legislation did he sponsor? Was he passionate about anything?
Granted that if you live in Massachusetts, fisheries are important but surely he could have found some time to get on the Intelligence Committee, the Foreign Affairs committee, something, for God’s sake!
And using the dodge of comparing him with Jack Kennedy doesn’t work because Jack Kennedy was elected to the Senate in 1952 and by 1956 was already nearly the Vice-Pesidential candidate.
Tom Oliphant of the Boston Globe said that he was no flash in the pan but someone who had been working at politics for 30 years. (By the way to Ray Suarez’s credit, he mentioned that Oliphant’s daughter was a speech writer for the Kerry-Edwards team. Suarez was the interviewer for PBS.)
Well, I don’t want a flash in the pan either but I want a guy who has read something, written something, done something or said something after serving for three terms in the Senate.
I have a feeling that this, along with his contradictory stands on the issues, will be a cloud over the Kerry campaign. His performance at Fenway Park during a Red Sox-Yankees game was horrendous from what I have read. He is definitely not “one of the guys” but he doesn’t have to be. Surely even though he went to Yale, he must have heard of FDR who in the middle of the worst depression in American history, wore a cape and used a cigarette holder. FDR was an aristocrat and didn’t hide it.
But who and what is John Kerry? That was one of the questions that was supposed to be answered at the DNC but, beyond some sentimental memories, it wasn’t. John Kerry, war hero, father and…
He reminds me of the people Christopher Lasch was taliking about in “The Revolt of the Elites”: rootless valueless and interested only in comfort and power.
Love him or hate him, or anything in between, people have a gut feeling who George W Bush is. When he speaks from his gut and says, “Bring ‘em on!” referring to the terrorists, it may irk our sophisticated European “allies” and the “Oh-so-sensitive” Canadians but you can bet that after Afghanistan, the fall of Iraq and Saddam Hussein sitting in an American jail, the terrorists know exactly and precisely where George W Bush is coming from.
And that is exactly what we need right now.