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How Dems delude themselves
August 1, 2004
BY MARK STEYN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST
'The embattled farmers stood and fired the shot heard round the world," declared Ted Kennedy, in a moment of Revolutionary War nostalgia. Or he would have done, if he'd managed to stick to his text. But, in a strikingly erratic performance even by his standards, what actually emerged from the senator's lips was: They "fired the shirt round the world.''
That sums up better than anything what the Democratic Party's been trying to do this last week for its presidential candidate: fire the stuffed shirt round the world, put a rocket up a guy who seems weighed down by his own self-importance and project him into the stratosphere. All the star speakers through the week were the equivalents of those bits of the rocket that boost you up into space and then fall away, leaving just the little capsule up there. And, who knows, if they boosted him up high enough, maybe nobody would notice just how little there is to John Kerry's little capsule.
Well, that was the theory. "I'm John Kerry," began the candidate on Thursday night, "and I'm reporting for duty!"
Democratic Party partisans appreciate this stuff -- a stageful of Swifties, the war-wounded Max Cleland, "we band of brothers, a little older, a little grayer" -- but they appreciate it mainly as a post-modern jest, a way of sticking it to the GOP. To anybody else, including those sought-after "swing voters" in "battleground states," it's starting to sound a little weird. John Kerry says he's running on his record, but, of his four decades of adult life, he's running on his four months in Vietnam. Of the other 39 years and eight months, there's nary a word....
"Any attack will be met with a swift and certain response."
Got that? If the Empire State Building's taken out, he'll certainly respond to it. Next time 'round, there won't be any mistakes about where the WMD are because they'll be in the middle of a big crater in Chicago....
John F. Kerry's bicycle cost $8,000. Why doesn't he sell his for democracy? If you throw in the designer French T-shirt and buttock-hugging lemon-hued lycra shorts, you'd probably be up around an even ten grand. When Howard Dean and John Kerry and John Edwards talk about "change," what they mean is you send these bazillionaire grandees the hundred-dollar bill and they'll keep the change.
What did that co-ed cutie get for her hundred bucks? Presumably she sent it to Governor Dean because he was anti-war. He lost to Senator Kerry, who at that time was for-and-against the war, in the same way that he's for-and-against abortion and for-and-against gay marriage. But he seems to have come down, Iraq-wise, on the "for" side of the ledger. He'll be spending a little more time ineffectually chit-chatting with Kofi and Jacques and Gerhard, but other than that his Iraq policy is sounding more like Bush's every day. That college kid ponied up her $100 and isn't getting a lot of "change." I wonder if she's missing her bicycle this summer.
There's a narcissism about the tone of this convention that cuts to the heart of the Democratic Party's difficulties: They don't believe in anything except their monopoly of goodness. That's why John Edwards' supposedly "appealing biography" is appealing only when put next to John Kerry's. Instead of marrying his money, he sued his way into it. But his message doesn't resonate with most Americans because it boils down to: If I can do it, you can't. But here's some government programs instead. On the other hand, Edwards' very condescension to the downtrodden masses confirms middle-class liberals in their sense of their own virtue.
That's the essence of this convention: a condescending media congratulating a condescending leadership for effectively communicating to their condescending activists their plans for everyone else. John F. Kerry should enjoy it while he can. It's downhill from here.
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