Author Archives: Michael Froomkin

Newsweek reports the soundbite du jour: Kerry's New Call to Arms. Seems Kerry will now roll the dice and make Iraq the main issue.

This is a sensible, but high-stakes strategy. On the merits it's Kerry's best issue: while people still don't agree on the merits of the attack, everyone honest agrees Bush's post-invasion plan was to collect garlands from the happy natives. It sure didn't work out that way.

While some will say Kerry has adopted this tactic now out of desperation, and who knows they might be right, the fact is that there was no sensible way Kerry could have done it any sooner. Facts on the ground were too fluid, and there was the danger that something might work out right. Now that danger seems attenuated.

A different danger for Kerry remains: that the Bush admin will lean on Pakistan to scoop up 'Osama bin forgotten' sometime during the next four weeks. That would — very unfairly but very effectively — take a good chunk of the wind out of Kerry's sails.

So it's a good strategy, a timely strategy, but still something of a risky strategy. That's in a way good too: any challenger who doesn't take risks usually loses, and there haven't been any risks taken since Kerry mortgaged his house to pay for Iowa.

Hmmm. That risk worked out OK, didn't it?

If the left-leaning blogs were as on-message as the right-leaning blogs, in the next few days you would be hearing a vast echo-chamber effect from this Gadflyer post, about GW Bush, Girlie Man.

By next weekend, you would hear questions based on it on your TV pundit shows.

A few days after this, the obvious wimpish implications of draft-dodging, cheerleading at Yale, and question-dodging would be standard watercooler stuff.

But in fact, Democrats are not organized (pace Will Rodgers), they fail to understand that if you repeat something often enough it becomes taken as true, and they don't own TV networks.

So it probably won't happen.

Even though, oddly enough (and the implications drawn from male cheerleading excepted), I'm in broad agreement with the Gadflyer article's basic thesis: Bush is frit. That's why, for example, he won't face questions from a representative public. That's why he's running away from the second debate, where he might have to face real, unscripted, people rather than the milquetoasts we have for journalists.

More tellingly, that's why we have this idiotic color-coding system for terror warnings that never goes down. Bush & Co. are terrified that they'll get blamed for being asleep at the switch again for the next terror attack, having been asleep at the switches for 9/11. As a result, rather than take the stiff upper lip approach used by the British government in light of IRA terror — an attitude in which the whole country more or less shrugged off the constant bombs, our government here in the US encourages public panic. The fact that 'security theater' and other silly and expensive actions which don't do much good are constant victories for the terrorists is less important than the paramount need felt by a certain type of moral cowards: the need to avoid blame at all costs.

John Kerry got near the edge of this with his speech recently about the pass-the-buck administration, the excuse presidency: never wrong, never responsible, never to blame, but it's really deeper than that.

OK. Now I probably deserve my induction into the Ancient and Hermetic Order of the Shrill.