Ode to Mark Steyn
Nothing makes me happier than a new Steyn column. In the Spectator, Steyn writes:
Desperate for payback for his month of SwiftVet hell, the thin-skinned Kerry demanded that his campaign went on the attack about Bush’s fitful National Guard service back in the Vietnam era. Nobody cares. But Dan Rather and CBS did a big story on whether Bush failed to show up for a physical in the War of 1812, and the Kerry campaign promptly lost most of September because Dan’s case had been built on laughably fake memos supplied as part of a convoluted deal involving the network, a man of dubious mental stability and key Kerry campaign contacts including Joe Lockhart, the former Clinton press secretary who was brought on board to get Kerry out of last month’s mess, not land him in this month’s.
In normal circumstances, you’d send the vice-presidential nominee out to serve as your attack dog and savage your detractors. But because Kerry is aloof and cold, he chose a running mate to supply all the warmth and charm and feel-good fluffiness he himself lacks. Whatever John Edwards’s strengths, he’s no attack dog. While Dick Cheney went around the country snarling devastating cracks about Senator Flip-Flop, Edwards was reduced to pleading for Bush to call off the SwiftVet ads. He looked as though he was about to burst into tears.
There is an attack dog on the Kerry team. Unfortunately, it’s his wife, and folks don’t like that in a prospective First Lady. Teresa Heinz Kerry dismisses her husband’s critics as ‘idiots’ and ‘scumbags’, and Kerry’s new advisers seem eager to limit her visibility. I’ve lost count of the number of Democrat women who’ve said to me that they can’t stand her. So that was the state of play in mid-September: a candidate in hiding, a lightweight running-mate way out of his league, and a motor-mouth wife duct-taped and tossed into the cellar.
Emphasis mine. I could read that all day long. Read the whole thing.
Labels: John Kerry
