Razzle Dazzle
Politics as Distorted Humor

By RICHARD STEIER

John Kerry last week proved once again why politicians shouldn't try to be the funniest guy in the room. In response, President Bush proved once again that he'll grasp at the shakiest of reeds to salvage political power.

Unlike in their 2004 race, when Mr. Bush allowed surrogates to pummel Mr. Kerry using specious logic, he did his own punching this time. And the Massachusetts Senator, rather than letting himself suffer lasting damage by just taking the pounding, as he did for a crucial stage of the presidential campaign, struck back fiercely before apologizing.

The big question, as voters went to the polls Nov. 7 with Republican control of Congress - and Mr. Bush's accompanying hope to avoid playing defense for the final two years of his term - hanging in the balance, was whether the electorate was ready to be fooled again. Would the American public once more allow itself to be distracted from the damage the President did to the battle against terrorism by invading Iraq, and make choices based on superfluous issues and phony rhetoric?

'Botched Joke' Gets Milked

'BOTCHED JOKE' ABOUT BOTCHED PRESIDENCY: Sen. John Kerry (left) found himself on the defensive, and eventually apologizing, after his remark to college students that he said was a reference to President Bush leaving the nation 'stuck in Iraq' was delivered clumsily enough to prompt charges that it was a putdown of the American troops serving there.

Senator Kerry touched off the controversy Oct. 30 when he told students at Pasadena City College in California, "You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq."

The following afternoon, speaking in Georgia, Mr. Bush told an audience of supporters that his old rival was maligning the intelligence of the American troops stationed in Iraq. "The Senator's suggestion that the men and women of our military are somehow uneducated is insulting, and it is shameful," the President declared.

Mr. Kerry fired back later that day that Mr. Bush was distorting the intent of his remarks for political purposes, calling his earlier remark "a botched joke about the President and the President's people, not about the troops."

He told reporters at a press conference he held in Seattle, "If anyone owes our troops in the field an apology, it is the President and his failed team and a Republican majority in the Congress that has been willing to stamp - rubberstamp - policies that have done injury to our troops and their families."

By the following day, however, Senator Kerry expressed "regret that my words were misinterpreted to wrongly imply anything negative about those in uniform."

It wasn't clear whether the White House attack machine would be able to exploit the controversy to mobilize its voting base and swing undecided voters in key congressional races at a time when disillusionment with Mr. Bush has begun to set in even among his conservative supporters.

For one thing, sentiment against the war in Iraq is so strong even among Republicans that some elected officials questioned the wisdom of the President bringing the issue further to the forefront. For another, as was acknowledged by former Uniformed Firefighters' Association President Jimmy Boyle, who campaigned for Mr. Bush in 2004, it was pretty certain that Mr. Kerry's incendiary line was a gibe at the nation's most prominent C student rather than a sneer at those serving in Iraq.

Unlike Mr. Bush and most of his leading advisers, prominent among them Vice President Cheney and political guru Karl Rove, Mr. Kerry knows what it's like to be a soldier fighting an unpopular war against an elusive and deadly enemy. While the President was sitting out the war in a Texas National Guard unit and Mr. Cheney was obtaining five draft deferments because, as he later said, he "had other priorities," Mr. Kerry distinguished himself as a Navy Lieutenant who commanded a gunboat in the Mekong Delta. His subsequent stance as a decorated veteran speaking against the Vietnam War was not a turn against his comrades but a demand that they be taken out of harm's way.

'Lacked the Courage to Fight'

He said last week, "If anyone thinks that a veteran, someone like me, who's been fighting my entire career for veterans ... would somehow criticize more than 140,000 troops serving in Iraq and not the President and his people who put them there, they're crazy."

Senator Kerry went on to say, "I'm sick and tired of a whole bunch of Republican attacks, most of which come from people who never wore the uniform and never had the courage to stand up and go to war themselves."

There was some cringing among Democrats who believed he had handed the President some raw meat to be exploited, with one candidate for Senator in Nebraska actually echoing Mr. Bush's spin and calling Mr. Kerry's "stuck in Iraq" remark "disrespectful and insulting." The question is, do they really imagine that a significant slice of the electorate remains that gullible, so susceptible to ruses that Mr. Kerry's "botched joke" could pay political dividends for Republicans?

Mr. Kerry claimed that the line he had planned to utter to his student audience asked if they knew what happened "if you're intellectually lazy. You end up getting us stuck in a war in Iraq. Just ask President Bush."

The irony of this version of what he meant to say is that a case could be made that Mr. Kerry and many of his Democratic colleagues - including both of New York's Senators - were guilty of just that sort of intellectual laziness when they voted four years ago to authorize Mr. Bush to go to war with Iraq. They knew the President well enough by then to realize that rather than merely providing leverage with Saddam Hussein, they were empowering him to once again act precipitously and not necessarily in the best interests of the American public.

Political Self-Defense?

Those Senators knew as well as anyone that there was no link between Saddam and Osama bin Laden, and that going to war with Iraq would divert troops and attention away from destroying the man and the terrorist network responsible for 9/11. And so, even if they could not have anticipated Iraq turning into a modern Vietnam, they should have understood that the potential risks of invading outweighed the rewards.

There were likely two motivating factors for most of the Democratic Senators who acquiesced and gave Mr. Bush his license to invade: concern about how "no" votes could be used against Democrats in the 2002 elections, and about how such votes might be exploited by Republicans to compromise the presidential ambitions of Senators like Mr. Kerry, John Edwards, and Hillary Clinton.

Taking the timid way out on the war authorization vote did not pay off politically, however. The Democrats were routed in the mid-term 2002 elections, including one particularly grotesque contest in which Georgia Sen. Max Cleland, a triple amputee as a result of wounds suffered in Vietnam, had his patriotism impugned by the Republican opponent who defeated him.

Senator Kerry, with Mr. Edwards as his running mate, was defeated by Mr. Bush in 2004, with his evolving stance on the Iraq war one of the prime examples used by Republicans to bludgeon him as a flip-flopper.

Fallout for Hillary

Senator Clinton might have seemed to escape consequences for her moment of political weakness, since she didn't even have to debate the issue during her reelection campaign, but it is the doubts her vote created about her character that have left so many Democrats looking elsewhere, from the old (Al Gore) to the new (Barack Obama), for a potential champion in 2008.

In contrast to the Democrats he once stampeded, Mr. Bush is like the late Howard Cosell: often wrong, but never in doubt. Despite his religious convictions, he has the morals of a back-alley fighter when it comes to politics - and a corresponding lack of shame.

During the 2000 Republican primary in South Carolina, his spinmeisters portrayed Sen. John McCain as someone whose long tenure as a prisoner of war during Vietnam had unhinged him mentally; four years later, they caricatured Mr. Kerry as someone who, by becoming a leader of the anti-war movement in the early 1970s, turned his back on the troops with which he had once served.

All that finger-pointing and smearing has allowed Mr. Bush to achieve political success while being an utter failure as a President over the past six years.

It is laughable to listen to Democrats and even Republicans call for the firing of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, as if he were the guy who bears the ultimate responsibility for what has happened in Iraq.

Had Cheney Pegged

The sway that Mr. Cheney supposedly holds over the President suggests that, despite Mr. Bush's professed determination to cast himself in the shadow of Ronald Reagan rather than his own father, he didn't pay nearly enough attention to the Gipper. It was Mr. Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz who argued hardest against cultivating relations with the Soviet Union during the Reagan Administration, and Mr. Reagan who had the good judgment to tune them out. (The prime area in which the current President has succeeded in emulating his role model is in widening the income gap between the rich and ordinary workers: both presided over eras in which they boasted of robust economies but real wages for nonsupervisory employees declined.)

Bad History, Bad Advice

The consequences of Mr. Bush's failure to follow Mr. Reagan's lead in ignoring Mr. Cheney offer perhaps the lasting lesson we have gleaned from the President Mr. Kerry calls, with justification, "intellectually lazy." If you rely on ideologically skewed retellings of history rather than actually studying it, you are doomed to make huge blunders.

We'll know better after the election whether Mr. Kerry's clumsily phrased remark allowed Mr. Bush to once again successfully change the subject, shifting the focus away from his disastrous handling of Iraq and Katrina and his lack of conspicuous successes elsewhere aside from cutting taxes for his wealthiest backers.

For Mr. Kerry, last week's contretemps should be a reminder that humor isn't necessarily a gift in politics. Many of the sharpest wits in that profession - Adlai Stevenson, Eugene McCarthy and Mark Green come to mind - never achieved their electoral goals. Rudy Giuliani's funniest moment in office - his appearing in drag during the 1997 Inner Circle Show - is now considered a potential liability for him should he seek the Republican nomination for President.

In contrast, it would be hard to find much rip-roaring humor in anything said by the two most effective and popular Presidents of the last 30 years, Mr. Reagan and Bill Clinton. Mr. Reagan's most famous wisecrack, the "There you go again" shot he fired at President Jimmy Carter during one of their 1980 debates, may explain why.

It came in response to Mr. Carter's claim that if elected Mr. Reagan would slash Medicare spending, one of a series of statements the challenger believed misrepresented his positions. The amiability with which Mr. Reagan delivered the line didn't make it any less of a zinger, however. And zingers make us laugh, but they also cause a certain amount of wincing when delivered in the political arena rather than in a comedy club.

Not Meant to Entertain

Mr. Bush more than any other modern President has had a life's arc that mimics that of the fictional Bluto Blutarsky of "Animal House," rising from drunken revelry in college to high elected office as a grown-up.

We don't look to government as a diversion from real life, however, but rather as a place where solutions might be found to the anguish and horrors that exist.

Mr. Kerry lost sight last week of the fact that young people look to their political leaders for inspiration, not entertainment. Mr. Bush, on the other hand, is incapable of providing either.