Cement Sack, Yes, but With Concrete Ideas

[Nicholas_J]

If John Kerry loses the election, and quite possibly even if he wins, the main thing people will remember about his campaign is how utterly bizarre it was that a major party nomination could have been captured by a man so staggeringly devoid of political talent.

The first job of a candidate is to win the election, a task to which Kerry seems spectacularly ill suited. This is not to say he won't beat President Bush, only that Kerry's contribution to a potential Kerry victory would be similar to the anchor's contribution to an America's Cup championship. Lest you think I'm exaggerating, some of Kerry's strongest supporters have explicitly likened him to ballast.

"I don't care if John Kerry is a sack of cement," former Texas Agricultural Commissioner Jim Hightower said in June. "We're going to carry him to victory."...

If Kerry does not stage a comeback (and he well might — I lend great credence to the cement sack strategy), the natural next step is for people to rationalize his failure. If he can't run a campaign, the argument goes, he would never have been able to run the White House.

That sounds reasonable enough unless you consider the fact that George W. Bush is a highly competent campaigner but a flaming disaster of a president. And it is exactly those things that make him so ruthlessly effective on the stump — centralized authority, Comintern-like party discipline, total disregard for the truth — that have created a hermetically sealed petri dish in which bad policies come to life and are carried out unchallenged.


http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-chait17sep17,1,642993.story

[Massacure]

1. "Highly competant campaigner but a flaming disaster of a president"

That's a pretty damn good quote!