No, John Podhoretz is probably not going to pull the D lever, whomever wins the nomination. But he concludes his New York Post Online Edition: postopinion piece by saying "Guys, you should have gone with John Edwards."
The problem is that the conventional wisdom hasn't taken a proper accounting of John Kerry. Here's the truth that Democrats don't want to admit and that Republicans are fearful of speaking openly because they don't want to jinx things:Posted by jk at April 27, 2004 09:26 AM
Kerry is a terrible, terrible, terrible candidate.
It's not so much the policies he proposes, although they don't add up to all that much. The problem is Kerry himself. He no sooner opens his mouth than he sticks first one foot and then the other right in there.
I tend to agree, and yet the foot in mouth problem does not seem to have hampered Bush's success. I think I would have prefered John Edwards as well. Kerry seems to me to have too much baggage. If he could just come out and say that yes, he was a bit of a hot headed radical when he was young I think he would be better off. There are enough issues in the world today, and the two candidates views differ enough on how to deal with them that I don't see the need to debate the 1970 version of the two men.
Posted by: Silence Dogood at April 27, 2004 10:28 AMI wouldn't call Bush's problem "foot in mouth." Our President misuses the language: malapropisms and mispronunciations. I don't recall him getting in trouble for the things he said.
Then again, I wouldn't call Kerry's problems foot-in-mouth. I think the better term is Mike Kaus's "Pandescenderer" when he panders and condescends at the same time.
But... Kerry DID say that (I was a bit of a hot headed radical when I was young). It hasn't helped because, he's a bit of a hot headed radical now too. Kerry definitely has a foot in mouth problem, and it's evidenced almost weekly. I think John Forkum hit the nail on the head at www.coxandforkum.com/archives/000325.html "You know that something's amiss when the straight forward task of reconciling a man's actions with his words gets so convoluted so often."
But what's with the presumption that Bush has the same problem? Example please. WMD? Even FRANCE believed he had them! Al Qaeda just tried to use them in Jordan, supplied from Syria, where unusually high truck traffic headed just prior to Op Iraqi Freedom. Dots, people... dots.
Posted by: johngalt at April 29, 2004 10:10 AM