Recline Yourself, Resign Yourself, You’re Through
At an August 1 campaign stop in Taylor, Michigan, Sen. John Kerry made what in retrospect appears to have been the most self-destructive of his many sports-related electioneering errors: He dissed his home-team Boston Red Sox.
“We’ve been waiting since 1918 for the Boston Red Sox to win the World Series,” Kerry acknowledged. But “if I had a choice between the White House and the World Series this year, I’m going to take the White House. How’s that?”
Answer: Not so good. Hell froze over, for one thing: The Red Sox did in fact go on to win the World Series, beating the hated New York Yankees–and the legendary “Curse of the Bambino”–in the process. At which point Kerry, having entered into a reverse Damn Yankees satanic compact, became pretty much guaranteed to lose his bid for the presidency.
Also, there was the Bob Shrum factor.
Mr. Shrum, of course, is the “superstrategist” whom Democratic presidential candidates make a special point to hire whenever they want to be absolutely sure they won’t win. His record is perfect on this score: Before this year, Shrum had held important positions in seven major Democratic presidential campaigns dating back to Edmund Muskie’s abortive primary effort in 1972. Sure, four years ago, things got a little hairy; Shrum hired up with Al Gore and–gasp!–almost won. A “stunned glow . . . washed over Shrum’s tearful face” on election night in 2000, another Gore aide recalled to the Washington Post a couple of months ago. “Bob kept saying, ‘Finally, finally’. . . . He didn’t really know what to do with himself.”
But 2004 wasn’t nearly so anxious-making. Shrum worked for Kerry. Kerry lost. Simple as that.
The Red Sox have been exorcised. But the Curse of the Shrumbino lives!
Saudi Cleric: Democracy Stinks
Even without Bob Shrum, on the other hand, Sen. Kerry would still have had to confront . . . well, the whole free-elections problem we have here in the United States.
Interviewed October 25 on Al-Majd, a Saudi satellite television network broadcast out of the United Arab Emirates, Saudi cleric Saleh Al-Munajid was notably downbeat about the upcoming American presidential election. After all, he asked his viewers, “What do you think of a voting system like the American one that gives a physician, an intellectual, an astronaut, an intelligent person and the head of the family, a vote that has the same weight as the vote of an ignorant, a fool, an idiot, an imbecile, a hippy, a bum, an unemployed man, who has no diploma, culture, or brains. What is this?!”
It’s not the system they’ve got in Al-Munajid’s country, that’s for damned sure. In Saudi Arabia, nobody votes. And–apparently–the fools, idiots, and imbeciles get invited onto TV shows to brag about the fact.
Howell Raines: Democracy Stinks
What does it mean that George W. Bush has won reelection? It means a couple of things, as former New York Times executive editor Howell Raines presciently explained–before the fact–in an Oct. 31 St. Petersburg Times column.
First of all, “If George Bush wins the presidential election, Americans can mark it down as a triumph of thug politics,” Raines suggests. The “altruism and good government” of the New Politics 1960s “has been displaced by an intellectual crudeness that was inherent in the modern American conservatism that began slouching toward Washington after the Republican convention in San Francisco in 1964.” This phenomenon is malign from below: Its base voters–“‘God’s People,’ as they call themselves”–are in one of their “frenzied national revivals” and now seek to legislate “theologically based cultural norms.”
And the conservative leadership is malign, as well, Raines adds, having been produced by a horrible genetic mutation in America’s once-noble aristocracy. “Who could have guessed that such a proud, powerful know-nothing as George W. Bush would be a scion of the great Industrial Age fortunes and a graduate of our second oldest university?”
Finally, Raines concludes, there’s the rot that now infects American journalism. It used to be that people instinctively esteemed the kind of man who was likely to be–for example–executive editor of the New York Times. But then “Fox and its enablers on the comedy news shows and among neoconservative intellectuals” came along and “destroyed public trust in that traditional model.”
So much does Mr. Raines respect the intelligence of his readers, incidentally, that he feels it unnecessary to remind them precisely how Fox and its neoconservative enablers accomplished this dastardly, devastating assault on the automatic prestige of the New York Times.
Conservatives being as stupid as they are, however, THE SCRAPBOOK figures it ought to spell this out plain as day: Mr. Raines’s discussion of American journalism’s current, sorry state omits all mention of the fabulist he promoted in the pages of his former paper, one Jayson Blair.
Nee Nee Nee Nee, Nee Nee Nee Nee
That’s the signpost up ahead, and John Kerry’s next stop, metaphorically speaking, is The Rather Zone.
“Al Gore’s situation is he’s basically got his back to the wall, his shirt-tail on fire, and a bill collector’s at the door.”
–CBS News anchor Dan Rather, Election Night 2000
“Kerry can still win it but at this point he’s got his back to the wall, his shirt-tail on fire, and a bill collector’s at the door.”
–CBS News anchor Dan Rather, Election Night 2004
Oui Oui Oui Oui, Oui Oui Oui Oui
Le Monde breaks the bad news to the French. Their man didn’t win the White House. As a result, they still have to contend with le cowboy. George W. Bush’s “foreign policy,” they report, “owes less to the intellectual persuasiveness of neoconservatism than it does to the trauma of the September 11 attacks. To be sure, thanks to his religious convictions, his Manichean view of the world, and his simplistic idea of a global struggle between Good and Evil, Bush was certainly predisposed to embrace the muscular internationalism and crusading spirit of neoconservatism. But without Osama bin Laden, that disposition would undoubtedly have remained in a latent state.
“Unfortunately, the effects of September 11–a feeling of vulnerability, mixed with military swagger and a sense of duty–have yet to be erased. The favorable vote for the Republicans shows that a great number of Americans are still making decisions based on their perception of a terrorist threat. . . .
“It is highly unlikely that the reelected president will be more disposed to consult his traditional allies over decisions about the security of the United States. The Republican administration is particularly unlikely to reach out to Europe, which it still distrusts. Americans can’t comprehend that for Europeans 11/9 (Nov. 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell) is more important than 9/11. For Europeans, the date that matters is that of reconciliation; for Americans, it’s the one when war was declared.”
