Does John Kerry understand that his first job as president is not to clean up the Republicans' mess, but to destroy the Republican party?
Erik Olson deserves a medal for that. What I've been looking for for a week.
That would just show that the CIA are great at covering their asses and terrible at uncovering anyone elses.
It's more reasonable to speculate that W crashed his airplane while drunk or coked up.
I wonder if anyone out there might know a military lawyer who can speak to any actual disctinction between 'honorable discharge' and 'separation', because the President really aggressively insists on the term honorable discharge.
If he was courtmartialed and busted to private, I think that would explain the whole thing.
Except they could have kicked him into a full tour in Vietnam, as I understand it.
What I wanted to get to was that I don't think there is any deep youth vote, or unorganized vote, anywhere. Youth, when they vote, tend to vote the way their parents do, or the way their parents would have at their age. And that is not going to be breaking toward Dean because he is addressing them as an unorganized constituency which will work only to help them define themselves in terms of who they would actually vote for.
Which comes to my second point,
I've thought for some time that Dean's appeal among a certain sort was that he seems to have many of the mannerisms of an Aspergers personality. The Aspergers person, as I think Patrick said somewhere, can come across as offputting because they put a lot of deep thought into something really fast and have to get the whole thing off their chests in one breath and lack a kind of spontaneous self-reflectivity that keeps the conversation of the ordinary population easy going. The more they feel about a topic, the less they can keep in check about it when the moment presents itself, which can give a rather over-stated impression --exactly like Dean's post-caucus speech, and exactly like his mistake in trying to develop a constituency among youth or non-voting populations.
The idea is right, but he overshoots the mark, reflexively, naturally, Aspergerishly overshoots it.
Voting for a Republican is worse than not voting at all. The 'non-voting' or uninvolved population that matters are those who might vote Republican.
John Kerry's exceptional calm is the very antithesis of Howard Dean's spontaneous overstatement and that is why people looked at him twice in Iowa.
I actually live in Iowa and I can't see what all the mystery is.
Why Kerry won instead of Dean is simply that there is no 'youth vote' in Iowa. Everyone in the state is an old fogey and Kerry, despite being a Massachusetts blue-blood, has a look and accent that seem very midwestern. And he has a long distinguished antagonism to Republicans in the Senate.
The Dean campaign's theory of bringing in people who don't or haven't participated before failed because there is no youth vote in Iowa and because anyone who is too shy about voting in a primary is going to be a hundred times shyer about walking into a caucus and standing up and talking to a bunch of intimidating old people who talk about this stuff all the time.
And Edwards is just the kind of young boy scout old fogies like to vote for.
So where's the mystery?
What they really resent is that something like the Hubble doesn't make money for anyone.
Once it's constructed, as far as they are concerned, it's useless, like roadbuilding in imperial China.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2004 | 9 |
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