They're Not The 'Sunshine Boys'
This story from National Review Online was written by David Frum.
You can't judge a magazine by its cover. I was so put off by Newsweek's nauseously obsequious July 19 "Sunshine Boys" front page that I refused to open the magazine. Big mistake! Put off guard by the magazine's floor-kissingly abject treatment, Democratic nominee-presumptive John Kerry opened up and revealed much more than usual of the man underneath the Foghorn Leghorn senator act.
My two favorite quotes from the Fineman-Wolffe interview with Kerry and Edwards. (No link, but you can find the source on p. 24.)
"NEWSWEEK: Is John Edwards the best-prepared person that you could have picked as your running mate to deal with defense and foreign-policy questions?
"KERRY: If I were just looking for someone who is solely versed in one topic, I could go find someone who would know a little more than him or even me on some one topic."
That "even me" is very delicious I think.
And then,
"NEWSWEEK [to Edwards]: Iran is a big problem; everyone is trying to grapple with it. How do you go about enforcing nuclear agreements when it seems the countries have a different agenda? And how do you stop Iran's nuclear program?"
Kerry interrupts: "Do you mind … since John just joined this ticket two days ago and he and I have not had the time to sit down, so he and I haven't fully brought up to speed on the speeches … I gave a speech in Fulton, Mo., in which I laid out what I sense are the priorities with Iran and proliferation."
Some observations that emerge from half a dozen pages of flattering prose:
1. Kerry's indecisiveness and his instinct to pander may not in the end be his greatest political weaknesses. (Some cynics might even consider them to be political strengths.) His greatest weakness may well be his seemingly fathomless personal vanity. He's already made it clear that he considers himself George Bush's moral, intellectual, and class superior. Interviewed by Newsweek, he could not resist doing the same to his vice president. This trait will not charm the electorate. If Kerry should ever make it to the White House, it will certainly not charm Congress.
2. If Kerry-Edwards wins in November, the era of the powerful vice president -- an era that began with Walter Mondale's effective vice presidency and culminated in Richard Cheney's powerful advisory role -- may abruptly end. As those two quotes imply, Kerry manifestly feels very little respect for his running-mate. Nor does there seem to be much love lost on the other side. Edwards speaks in relentlessly groveling terms about Kerry, but I doubt that he enjoys it -- or means it. The Kerry-Edwards ticket is often compared to Dole-Kemp in 1996, but to me it looks much more like the Democrats' 1960 ticket if Lyndon Johnson had won the nomination and John F. Kennedy had been given the vice presidency: The man on top disdaining his number two as a witless fop with a good barber; the number two privately ridiculing the number one as a heavy-handed and graceless embarrassment.
3. The Democrats are not well served by the media bias in their favor. Irritating as conservatives may find these quadrennial orgies of positive publicity for the Democratic nominees, any Democratic nominees, conservatives at least know not to believe it. Liberals though find themselves being whirled about by their own spin until they are dizzy. Newsweek's Democratic-leaning readership may be delighted to see the dour and long-winded Kerry compared to a summer's day -- but the nearly 300 million Americans who do not readNewsweek are much more likely to believe the evidence of their own eyes and ears. I sometimes think that Democrats suffer from the same problem as ultimately felled Saddam Hussein: They cannot trust their servants to report the truth. And the truth is that they have nominated themselves the weakest presidential candidate since Michael Dukakis.
4. On the other hand, keen-eyed readers can gather little glimmerings of the truth if they invest the time to crack the newsmagazine's code. Sometimes the code works by euphemism. When the newsmagazines describe Kerry as "nuanced," they mean indecisive. Sometimes it works by Pravda-style inversion. When they describe the acutely class-conscious Mrs. Edwards as "down to earth," they mean she is a ferocious snob. (Newsweek quotes a friend on Mrs. Edwards's populist style: "She connects to real people." And who is this expert on "real people"? Sharon Rockefeller!) And sometimes they give up altogether and just go with the horrible truth: As when the same correspondent who praised Elizabeth Edwards acknowledged in the May 3 edition of Newsweekthat the Democrats "would lock [Teresa Heinz] in a closet if they could."
David Frum is a contributing editor to National Review.
By David Frum
Reprinted with permission from National Review Online