You’re right, Sam. Presidential candidates who raise their voices and use strong words don’t get elected to office. That’s the reason Theodore Roosevelt had such a lackluster political career.
Some people think Bush is stupid. Some people think Bush is a schemer. AFAIK, there is not one person who believes both views simultaneously.
Me, I’m in the group that says Bush is “stupid,” at least in the sense that learning more about a topic takes more effort than he wants to expend. The role of Dastardly Schemer™ belongs to Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and Karl Rove.
I’m basically on the same page except I would say that Bush is more intellectually lazy than stupid. And, he does have very good political instincts (well, much of the time).
As for Gore, he’s actually given a few of these speeches now over the past year or so. Some were sponsored by moveon.org. And, I agree that Gore as someone free to speak his mind is much more appealing to me than Gore as a candidate. Whether or not he would be more appealing to swing voters though, I am not sure. (And, of course, there is always the trade-off between energizing your base and appealing to swing voters.)
At any rate, one of these speeches by Gore contains more truth and wisdom than the sum total of all Bush’s speeches since he has been in office.
C’mon, you all know how a campaign works. The main attacks have to be from supporters, not the candidate. He has to look statesmanlike. A candidate who has a background as an attack dog has to be able to convince the press to run some b.s. about how he’s “grown and changed”.
Lest we forget, Gore won with a more broadly-focused but still strenuously populist approach last time. Now that he’s “liberated”, he can do more of what it takes to help his party’s candidate win. One can only wonder if he regrets dropping out - the landscape is seriously different now and he might well be able to win again.
Oh, I don’t know. I’d vote for Angel on the Smile Time ticket.
I think this nails it. Gore is doing exactly what he should be doing right now, and what Kerry can’t really do: he’s telling it like it is.
Is he speaking to the choir? Sure, in some ways: he’s trying to motivate apathetic Democrats to be less apathetic. However, I suspect he’s also speaking to some of the undecided. Some folks are uneasy about the war, but aren’t really sure just how uneasy to be about the Administration; hearing someone lay out the reasons for their unease in black and white might persuade them that they’ve not been hard enough on Bush so far.
Kerry has to remain presidential: if he does otherwise, Bush will accuse him of being unpatriotic, of giving aid and comfort to terrorists, of wanting to coddle dictators, and so forth. Such charges would be offensive nonsense, ,of course, but then Kerry would have to waste his time defending himself instead of giving policy speeches.
Daniel
Whoosh!
Smile Time? :dubious:
Yeah. Kerry should just stick to the facts, like how he cast the deciding vote that created 20 million jobs…
An esoteric reference to the recent “muppet” episode of Angel.
Thanks, I almost never watch TV so I would have gone to my grave wondering , WTH?
While that statement is certainly not a high-point of the Kerry campaign and I don’t endorse it, at least it bears some tangential relationship with reality in the sense that the measure passed by 1 vote and that 20 million jobs were created over the next several years. This puts him ahead of Bush’s claims on the subject of jobs and just about everything else!
I would prefer to have a President who will never stretch the truth. But, I would settle for one who does it only occasionally rather than in virtually everything he utters.
Saw mention of Kerry following in Al Gore’s steps today (they called it an effective 1-2 punch :)). Some excerpts from Kerry speech on security - May 27, 2004 below seem to indicate that Kerry is taking off the gloves. Of course, I doubt he could ever muster the “fire and brimstone” that Gore did yesterday, which in my book, is a shame.
What Kerry has to do is coast a little bit more; relax and wait until July 1 or 2, or a time when the Iraq transisition blowsback in Bush’s face. Then really run for president, this time from a sense of urgency.
…and this speech proves it! His ranting did more to convince me than any of his nonsense to date!
Go ahead…if this clown is all that Kerry can scare up as an endorsement, then Bush has nothing to worry about! :smack:
Well, it’s pretty easy to just point and call names. Care to explain why you think he’s insane, when the general feeling is that the speech was somewhere between good and fantastic and painfully true? Are you saying that all those people are also insane? What exactly was insane about it?
Borrowing a page from another poster on the boards:
You’re right, of course. Bush has nothing to worry about this election cycle; nor do Republicans. Y’all are going to win this election in a cakewalk; y’all are doing everything exactly right. Keep on keepin’ on, and we’ll be back here the day after the election to admire what a great job you did.
Daniel