March 15, 2004
John Kerry, fog machine
Wryly amusing column by David Brooks on the presumptive Democratic nominee:
The 1990's were a confusing decade. The certainties of the cold war were gone and new threats appeared. It fell to one man, John Kerry, the Human Nebula, to bring fog out of the darkness, opacity out of the confusion, bewilderment out of the void.Kerry established himself early as the senator most likely to pierce through the superficial clarity and embrace the miasma. The gulf war had just ended. It was time to look back for lessons learned. "There are those trying to say somehow that Democrats should be admitting they were wrong" in opposing the gulf war resolution, Kerry noted in one Senate floor speech. But he added, "There is not a right or wrong here. There was a correctness in the president's judgment about timing. But that does not mean there was an incorrectness in the judgment other people made about timing."
A prediction: Kerry's lack of both achievement and popularity in the U.S. Senate make him a national version of Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Maryland's failed nominee for governor that Democrats simply could not get excited about. We'll see if enough Pavlovian anti-Bush fervor will truly transfer to the fog machine.
