A Strong Odor
What exquisite timing these Kerry-Edwards people have, don’t they? Like Alfred Hitchcock or something: With just seconds to spare, right when you were getting ready to pretty much explode from the suspense, the Democratic National Convention Committee last week–ta-daaaah!–“unveiled the thematic framework for the 2004 Democratic National Convention.” Got a pencil? Good, because it turns out the thematic framework in question is a complicated one, and you’ll want to mark your calendar appropriately. No two evenings of the Democratic convention will be the same, thematic framework-wise: “Using speakers, videos, and other programmatic elements,” organizers will actually “amplify several themes over the course of the four-day” proceedings.
On Monday, July 26, for example, “the Convention will highlight the Kerry-Edwards plan to make America strong at home and respected in the world.” It seems that both gentlemen “believe that a stronger America begins with a strong economy.” But they “also know that to be strong at home, America must be respected in the world.” So a Kerry-Edwards administration will “strengthen our military” and “lead strong alliances.” Among the featured speakers Monday evening will be Rep. Stephanie Tubbs-Jones of Ohio, who will explain the Democratic party’s plan for a “stronger economy,” and Rep. Bob Menendez of New Jersey, who will discuss the campaign’s innovative proposals to “strengthen America’s position in the world.”
Things will take a dramatically different turn on Tuesday the 27th, when the convention will celebrate John Kerry’s lifetime of “strength and service.” You may not be aware of this, but “John Kerry’s life reflects strength,” among other fine attributes. So Tuesday evening, various “speakers will talk about John Kerry’s lifetime of strength and service.”
Wednesday, the focus will shift to the need for “a stronger, more secure America.” Only John Kerry and John Edwards have “the strength of character and toughness” to achieve that noble goal, and they’ll do so by “building a strong military” and “strengthening international alliances.” Look for Wednesday night’s speakers to offer more specifics about “the Kerry-Edwards path to a strong and more secure America.”
Finally, on Thursday evening, “John Kerry will address the nation” and pledge to “build an America that is stronger at home and respected in the world.” Mind you, Kerry will “also talk about his optimistic vision to build a stronger America” and his commitment to “strengthening faith, family, and freedom.” Introducing Kerry will be former senator Max Cleland of Georgia, who’ll testify that the Democratic nominee “can be trusted to lead America to safer and stronger times.” And as a special treat, some time before the night is done, one of Kerry’s Vietnam-era military buddies will be on hand to reminisce about his friend’s “strength of character.”
THE SCRAPBOOK is impressed. An ordinary presidential candidate might shrink from such an ambitious and complicated program for fear of confusing his audience. But Kerry is clearly made of stronger stuff.
Stronger Than Last Time, Anyhow
There was one other piece of totally surprising, attention-grabbing news from the Kerry-Edwards team last week. On July 15, the Democratic campaign announced that it had “accepted the Commission on Presidential Debates’ 2004 debate schedule.”
No, silly, that in itself was not a surprise. Nor was it a surprise, as this second Kerry-Edwards press release pointed out, that the Republican campaign hadn’t yet offered a comparable scheduling commitment. Bush is always pulling stunts like this, after all. You’ll remember, for example, how “in 2000, the Bush campaign agreed to a series of three presidential debates at the last minute, deliberately stalling so as to lower expectations about Bush’s debate skills and performance.” And we all know what happened after that.
It’s just that we wouldn’t have expected the Kerry-Edwards campaign to be so brutally candid about it. “In the end,” their July 15 statement concluded, “Bush was declared the winner of each of the three debates against Vice President Al Gore.”
Gore, incidentally–notwithstanding the fact that he somehow managed to lose three straight debates to that lummox Bush–will nevertheless be making his own featured appearance at the Democratic convention in Boston. He’s slotted for Monday night, along with that other famous symbol of Democratic party strength, Jimmy Carter.
As we say, this thematic framework business is complicated.
Hatfill v. Kristof
By means of a lengthy complaint filed Tuesday, July 13, with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, biodefense researcher Dr. Steven J. Hatfill–remember him?–has finally, as long expected, sued the New York Times and its columnist Nicholas D. Kristof for defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress. Hatfill is asking for both actual and punitive damages in connection with a series of Times columns Kristof published in 2002, columns which all but explicitly pronounced Hatfill guilty of the previous year’s ghastly string of anthrax-by-mail terrorist murders. Should he prove his case on the merits, Hatfill’s plea for damages against Kristof and the Times–who did more than anyone else to retail various purportedly incriminating “facts” about the scientist’s character and background–would seem to be a strong one. Just for starters, Hatfill, made indelibly notorious by Kristof’s columns, hasn’t been able to find a single day’s paid work since those columns first appeared.
Interestingly, the Times has responded to Hatfill’s lawsuit with precisely the sort of highhanded recklessness that he’s alleging against them to begin with. “We believe this case does not have merit,” says Toby Usnik of the paper’s corporate communications office.
Mr. Usnik is seriously misinformed. First off, Kristof began his series of columns on Hatfill in May 2002, not July–as he himself would later acknowledge in one of those columns that August (“Since May, I’ve written periodically about a former U.S. Army scientist who, authorities say privately, has become the overwhelming focus of the investigation into the anthrax attacks last fall”). Furthermore, Hatfill had most definitely not been publicly identified as an FBI “person of interest” before Kristof started writing about the subject–that wouldn’t happen until the final week of June 2002. And last but not least, while it is true that Kristof did eventually wind up weakly endorsing a “genuine assumption that [Hatfill] is an innocent man caught in a nightmare,” the Times had already by then published several months’ worth of Kristof’s lurid gossip-mongering about the poor man–and a number of other publications, including this one, had already raised serious questions about whether that gossip had any genuine evidentiary basis.
In reply to a charge that it’s gotten its facts wrong, the Times gets its facts wrong. Round one to Dr. Steven J. Hatfill.
