Waves

On the eve of the Virginia and Tennesee primaries that are likely to turn the rest of the Democratic presidential nominating process into a formality, it's worth pausing for a moment to look at the dynamics of the upcoming months of contention between John Kerry and G.W. Bush.

For Bush and the Republicans, the dynamic is quite different than it has been for the past two years plus. Two sorts of things have happened. The first could be called the chickens coming home to roost, or the reality catching up with the illusion. The rationale for the war in Iraq, and by extension the way the Bushies choose to run the war on terrorism, is at best now in question. Readers of AmericanSamizat will not be surprised by the "revelations" of the past weeks regarding WMDs, a war forced for political reasons rather than in defense of America, and so on. Neither will they be surprised that Bush economic policies have devastated lives all over the country, and threaten to do so for generations yet to come. The only news about all this is how and when these situations were revealed. No one could have predicted it would have been now.

The second thing is related to the first but not completely dependent on it. It is that the media and the media audience are now receptive to hearing the reality falling like a ton of bricks on the Bushies' manufactured illusions. In part this too was inevitable, though the timing could not be predicted. For years the media was acting as if hypnotized, and in a way they were. The media powers are located in New York and Washington, and any time we talk to people from there, it is clear how deeply traumatic 9/11 was, in deeply personal ways. That's the charitable reading of why the news media became the propaganda arm of the Bush administration. Feeling themselves under attack, they rallied behind their king to defend their country. They competed only to wave the flag higher than each other. But somehow, somebody counted to three , and they woke up from that hypnosis. They are appalled at what they did, and the extent of their loss of reason and skepticism is partly reflected in the power of their skepticism now, aimed at Bush. Now Time magazine has a cover suggesting there is a Bush credibility gap. And as usual when he is really under pressure, Bush is wilting.

That's part of what's happening with the media. There's also the nature of story: you can only go so long with the same plotline. There has to be a reversal at some point or the story becomes boring and no one will watch or read or buy it. The rise has to be followed by the fall.

Together these two elements created a massive wave that is now washing across the political and media landscape. By fortunes of timing, John Kerry is riding that wave. His rise in the primaries, his message at its high point of articulation, the primaries themselves and how the candidates are behaving, the behavior of the voters, have all contributed to an extremely fortuitous force. Now Kerry is the New hero, while Bush, the emperor of an hour ago, looks weak, without clothes.

But it's best not to entirely buy into the media bobbleheads' latest tune. Just a month ago they were saying Bush would ride easily to re-election. Now they are saying doom, for they don't believe things will get better in Iraq or the economy will generate enough jobs to blunt that growing issue.

But events could intervene. What would the capture or death of Osama bin Laden do to everyone's political calculations? What if Iraq pastes together an actual government in July that doesn't fall apart by October? It's widely believed that a significant terrorist attack on the U.S. or its allies would hurt Bush, but that's not necessarily so. It would give him the opportunity to look strong again. Why people bought that the first time is hard to understand, since it costs Bush nothing to act strong and he has plenty of people around him to pump him up. He's never in any real danger from terrorists or Saddam Hussein. He's in danger from Tim Russert and the voters, and he looks it.

The tide may continue to favor Kerry. He's good in ways Gore wasn't, and maybe he'll also stay lucky. Certain elements of this current tide are likely to keep building, like the jobs issue and particularly health care. Kerry is capable of making the deficit more of an issue than the bobbleheads believe, along the lines of the moveon ad that shows children working on the assembly line to pay for the Bush tax cut for the wealthy. That is, the future will be paying. He'll also point out the massive cuts in social programs and infrastructure that Bush has scheduled for after the election. If Kerry can tie in what's happening right now in states and municipalities, as they cut services and people lose jobs, this issue will continue to build. Kerry will also add new issues that resonate: energy and the environment.

The Bushies are counting on their huge hoard of campaign money to fill the airwaves with charges against Kerry that can't be simultaneously answered because they're made in ads. They'll go after him as a liberal, for proposing tax increases (which was obviously part of the whole idea of cutting taxes on the rich, so that when Democrats tried to get that money back Republicans could say they were increasing taxes). Perhaps they'll raise the "special interests" issue, or go after him for throwing or not throwing his medals in protest. (He's been criticized for throwing his medals on the steps of the Pentagon to protest the Vietnam war, but he threw his ribbons and kept his medals. So he's also been criticized for NOT throwing his medals, but the medals of other soldiers who asked him to.)

They'll try to do to Kerry what they did to John McCain in the 2000 primaries, and what Bush the First did to Dukakis. Why not? It's always worked before. In a way, we're glad they're thinking that way, because we believe there's a very good chance that this time it won't work. The voters are tired of it, they may not even hear it this time, and Kerry is very good at defending and counterattacking.

But the Bushies will keep doing it whether it works or not because it is all they know. They believe that perception is reality, that the photo op is more important than the duplicity afterwards. You can see it in everything Bush says---he just keeps repeating the same bald assertions and lies, even when it's clear he knows they're now falling flat, and being so obviously contradicted by reality. But they'll keep doing it---and hope that with enough stage managing, with the right pictures and music in the flow of their campaign ads, they'll get away with it yet again. It's the ultimate in cynicism. But this time it's old, and maybe it's too old to work.

That Bush was king especially to Republicans has thrown the party into confusion as his feet of clay are exposed. Their ideological differences are being revived by his more outrageous policies, and their identity is no longer quite so clear . They have nowhere else to go but Bush, of course, but at a time that Democrats appear to be energized and united, even some sluggishness could be costly, and a few well placed survivalist agendas could be disastrous.

There are lots that can happen to turn the tide, or to turn the whole process into a series of whirlpools and rocks. The biggest danger we see is that something happens to absorb the media, something big enough to get them competing with each other on a single story or a single obsession, so that what Kerry is saying and doing out on the campaign never gets covered. That's the truly scary thing about the media these days, even apart from deliberate control by a small number of conglomerate corporations. The media no longer feels a responsibility to cover the candidates for president, to print or show what they say on issues. They can fill their airtime talking to each other, debating their own self-generated ideas and scenarios. What's very sad about this especially is that the process hasn't yet reached bottom. You can go for weeks and months without seeing an experienced, intelligent and relatively sophisticated adult newsperson on cable TV, unless you really look for the few that have regular slots. But you see all of the surviving ones covering elections. It's like finding a tribe that was supposed to have vanished---where are they keeping them, we didn't know so many were still around. Try watching CNN's election coverage and switching for a moment to CNN Headline News and you'll see exactly what we mean. Headline News has become MTV News Lite. They even put one of their last remaining adults in a hockey shirt with USA across it the other day, to report the news. (He was wearing a shirt and tie under it.)

So the dynamic has changed considerably, and that's good for Kerry now---and of course we believe good for the country, the world and the future. Maybe this is just the beginning of a long term change that will last into the election and beyond. Our resident intuitives believe it will. Our resident skeptics aren't so sure. But our majority agrees on one thing: this particular wave will eventually break. Let's hope there's another bigger one just like it right behind.