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Saturday, July 03, 2004
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AND THAT'S WHY HE'S GOING TO LOSE
I've seen some really bad political campaigners before. Michael Dukakis comes to mind. So do Bob Dole and Al Gore. Prime Minister Paul Martin of Canada just completed a campaign that was almost spectacular in its awfulness. He didn't so much win the election (which ended in an unsustainable minority government), as the Conservative caucus lost it by saying fantastically stupid things.
John Kerry seems determined to beat them all.
As some of you may know, the United States Constitution requires each president to have a vice president, in the event of the president's death, incapacity, impeachment or resignation. This is far more common than most people realize. Of the 42 men who have served as president (Bush is referred to as the 43rd only because Grover Cleveland served non-consecutive terms. If, say, Jimmy Carter, were the nominee and was elected this year, he would not revert back to being the 39th president, he would be the 39th and 44th.), 9 have not completed their term of office. That's almost one in four. When deliberating whether or not to accept the vice presidential nomination in 1960, Lyndon Johnson is reported to have said, "I like those odds."
The picking of a vice-president is one of the few decisions a non-incumbent candidate can make that will demonstrate what kind of a president he will be. Accordingly, this choice is revealed in a way that will generate maximum media impact. Bill Clinton assembled the press to the Governor's Mansion in Little Rock to announce Al Gore. Bob Dole summoned the world to his birthplace is Kansas to annunce Jack Kemp. Before that VP selection is one of the very few things that made the conventions interesting.
So how is Kerry going to announce his choice? By fucking e-mail, that's how. And it's not like he's going to e-mail every eligible voter in the United States. Oh no, you have to subscribe for e-mail from his jerk-off website to get it. Perhaps I'm a little goofy, but doesn't it stand to reason that anyone who signed up to recieve e-mail from johnkerry.com is already going to vote for him?
On top of that, he made that announcement in Minnesota, a state that he would have to develop a particularly nasty Ketamine habit to lose.
This only adds to the fact that the more voters get to know Kerry, the higher his unfavorable rating rises. According to to a New York Times/CBS poll this week, Bush's approval rating is a 42% (an all time low for him), a majority of Americans think the war in Iraq was a mistake and that the economy is so bad that they're about 3 weeks from living in Hoovertowns. Yet the president still leads Kerry by one point.
At some point, people are going to start asking themselves what it's going to take for Bush to lose. And with an opponent like Kerry, and Ralph Nader getting increasingly testy with the Democrats, it's hard to imagine a scenario where that happens.
And amateur hour in Boston hasn't even started yet. That'll be funny when the country turns on their TVs to see a city whose workers are almost all on strike, the only economic activity happening is gay marriages and the mayor personally detests his party's nominee for president. This should be a FUN convention. As opposed to the Republican convention, which will have speakers like Rudy Giliani, Arnold Schwarzenegger and George Pataki....all of whom seem to be the least representative figures of this administration who aren't John Kerry, Ralph Nader and Michael Moore.
Good times. Good times.
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