Bush, by announcing he’ll let the United Nations pick the new government for Iraq to which the United States will hand power in two months, has taken off the table the one major difference with the administration that Kerry has articulated. And yet Kerry’s incompetent campaign has chosen this moment to spend $17 million in part to air an ad on Iraq in which JFK reiterates his vague noises about "internationalizing" the occupation while providing no specifics—a bizarre decision. This is the first of the Kerry ads to bear the personal signature of Bob Shrum, Kerry’s pricey media-and-message guru. But when Shrum’s tawdry squabbling over power and money (in a dispute over who’d get the huge commissions for buying the ads) hits the front page of The New York Times, that’s the sure sign of a campaign that is in deep trouble—and of a consultant who’s out of touch with reality.
Unwilling and unable to attack Bush on Iraq, Kerry is likewise finding it hard to get traction on economic issues because he has no coherent or credible message that resonates with the electorate. The Washington Post’s Jim VandeHei, in an article headlined "Old School Team To Sell Kerry as a Modern Centrist," interviewed Kerry’s top command and dissected the JFK strategy on the economy: "Kerry and his advisers seek to blend a traditional populist rant against big corporations with policies designed, in part, to placate business—such as his across-the-board tax break for corporations." This sort of hypocrisy (which also bears Shrum’s signature) won’t wash—particularly with Bush able to point to 500,00 new jobs so far this year (even though they’re mostly low-paying service sector ones) and an over-inflated Dow holding steadily above 10,000 (at a time when 54 percent of Americans—largely through their 401Ks—are stockowners, this Wall Street bubble is unlikely to make them nervous.)
In fact, as the excellent Craig Crawford pointed out in a must-read Congressional Quarterly column on Kerry’s policy dance to the center as a self-proclaimed "entrepreneurial Democrat," "Remember triangulation? Well, it’s back." The retread Clintonistas like Roger Altman and Gene Sperling who have crafted Kerry’s milquetoast, pro-corporate economic approach have ceded to Bush on the central Republican theory of supply-side economics instead of challenging it. To Bush’s simplistic but appealing slogan of "Tax Cuts Work," Kerry opposes only... more and slightly different tax cuts.
Where is the soaring vision of government as the protector of the economically powerless, the left-outs and the have-nots against unbridled corporate power, as opposed to the Republican portrayal of government as the enemy of the people? Kerry may trot out a few Shrum-scripted populist phrases to cover up his lackluster Bush-lite economics, but this cosmetic overlay is unlikely to energize the Democratic base—in sharp contrast to Bush’s use of the hot-button social issue of gay marriage to reignite the enthusiasm of the conservative and Christian right (another issue, by the way, on which Kerry has straddled—opposing Bush’s Federal Marriage Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, but supporting a similar amendment to the Massachusetts Constitution banning same-sex weddings )........
http://www.tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/10294
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