US election campaign divorced from reality

[Nicholas_J]

THE American presidential election campaign of 2004 is taking place in a parallel universe. President George Bush’s Iraq adventure is unravelling by the day and the security situation on the ground is becoming desperate; but he has a healthy lead in the polls and, though the campaign still has a long way to run, must be regarded as being on course for re-election.

The war on terrorism is in danger of being lost and the national finances are drowning in a sea of red ink; yet the campaign has been dominated, so far, by Senator John Kerry’s record in Vietnam over 30 years ago and how Bush behaved in the Alabama National Guard, also over three decades ago. For a forward-looking country, this is a very backward-looking election.

Despite periodic nastiness from both sides, it is also surprisingly sedate, given the immensity of the issues at stake, thanks partly to a domestic media which treats both candidates with kid gloves. Instead of incumbent and challenger being grilled mercilessly by robust inquisitors, both criss-cross the country hermetically sealed from all but the party faithful, unquestioned by journalists (who seemed more interested last week in Hurricane Ivan than the election) or even, perish the thought, voters.

This disconnection between the harsh realities facing America at home and abroad and the surreal nature of the campaign is playing into President Bush’s hands. Senator Kerry’s inability to strike a chord with the concerns of ordinary voters condemns him to remain locked in the campaign’s parallel universe, which is to Bush’s advantage, because an outbreak of reality would undermine his case for re-election; indeed by constantly harping on about his Vietnam record Kerry has only added to the unreality and let the incumbent off the hook. Kerry now thinks it was a mistake to make so much of Vietnam at the Democrats’ Boston convention; but what compelling theme will take its place remains a mystery.

http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=1099852004

[rfkrocks]

1. awesome piece-too bad we hear it from Scotland!

I wonder how long will it take before an American reporter (Krugman, Herbert and a few others aside) states this theory correctly-

[rwenos]

2. Compare our Media to BBC

I watched the BBC World Service tonight on KCET in Los Angeles. It's SO OBVIOUS the war in Iraq is being soft-soaped in the U.S. media. The BBC actually shows bloody explosions, people screaming, smoke, bullets, blown up cars.

This was true during the major combat portion of the invasion also. American news sources were quite antiseptic. The BBC showed the real thing -- blood, explosions, death.

What IS it about Americans that makes us so averse to seeing the world as it is?

[Lindacooks]

3. Kerry is hardly

"hermetically sealed from all but the party faithful".

That is a blatant lie.

BUSH is certainly sealed off, with his hand-picked audiences and signed loyalty oaths.

Senator Kerry's gatherings are OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.

BUSH'S* are invitation-only.

[Zensea]

6. Was it the Delphi Oracle who said

know thyself?
One of the hardest things is to know thyself.
I wouldn't say it was a blatant lie, but the perspective of someone outside the country.
Let's put it this way, who other than the party faithful shows up at the gatherings even if they are open to the public? That might be what the author is talking about.

[BillZBubb]

4. All US campaigns involving a Bush are divorced from reality.

That's how they work the system. They are the kings of the wedge and the misdirection. Since a large part of the idiotic American public falls for it, they have no reason to change. It's a successful formula.

This is the one lesson the Democratic strategists never have learned.

[EndElectoral]

5. Our media is doing everything to keep Kerry's message from getting out

[OneBlueSky]

7. excellent article . . . this pretty much sums up Kerry's problem . . .

"His inconsistency over Iraq, for example, has been breathtaking, resulting in him having no clear message on the most pressing issue of the day. The senator voted for the war. He then voted against the $87bn the administration requested for post-invasion security and the rebuilding of Iraq. Last week he railed against the war’s price tag to date ($200bn and rising), saying it should have been spent on health care and other domestic necessities. Yet a year ago, when asked if too much was being spent in Iraq, he replied: "We should increase funding ... by whatever number of billions of dollars it takes to win."

"The Kerry line on Iraq is that he would woo allies and create a much wider international coalition to rebuild Iraq. But Europe has already rumbled that this amounts to no more than George Bush with a smile rather than a smirk. It is inconceivable, given the bloody quagmire Iraq has become, that the French or Germans (or anybody else for that matter) would now deploy their troops there just because there was a new, friendlier broom in the White House. It also suffers from congenital Kerry inconsistency. There was no wider international coalition in modern history than the one the first President Bush put together to fight the first Gulf War. Kerry voted against it in the Senate.

"This is the sort of stuff which makes Democrats despair. "Kerry should be ahead by 10 points at this stage of the campaign," a leading Democratic strategist said to me. "It is a measure of the ineptitude of his campaign that he’s almost 10 points behind." It is not the only measure."



Kerry's position(s) on Iraq has become a real Achilles heel . . . he needs to find a way to come out four square against the war, and offer a plan to bring American troops home a lot sooner than by the end of his first term . . . just how he can do that is something for minds far sharper than mine to contemplate . . .

[the_outsider]

8. well written n/t