Last thoughts on John Kerry
I do mean last thoughts, because just as no one had heard of this guy before he ran for president, no one has heard from him since he lost. I know I’ve always been rough on John Kerry (or, as I call him for short, Jerry) and I want to give a few moments of my own opposing viewpoint before I return to being rough on him, and then, finally, forget about him altogether.
Strength/Weakness: Communication
I never felt he had the ability to really communicate with people in ways that they appreciated. Even worse, whenever he did pull this off, voters interpreted it as slick. This may not be a problem just for Jerry: it may be the dawning of an age where the only way to be trusted by the voting public is to be obviously wrong about everything, because no one would think you were wrong all the time cynically.
Despite my misgivings, I was impressed with him in the debates. His performance was not, as I had feared it would be, some “winning on points” debate-society style they teach you on yachts. It was clear, reasonable, and consistent. While he occasionally missed an opportunity to underscore just how wrong Bush’s comments were, he got most of them, and in exactly the way I would have done it. (I’d give examples, but who wants to watch the debates again?)
If Jerry could have gotten through to people during the rest of the campaign the way he did in the debates, I would have been very pleased.
Strength/Weakness: History
Now, we all know that the guy went to Vietnam. It was mentioned a few times. And we all know he became a war protester afterwards. I’d just like to make sure it’s understood that we had a guy running for president, in fact the nominee of his party, who had made his start as a young activist. That is pretty rare, and a lot more exciting to me than the typical political history.
Of course, he squandered this auspicious beginning with thirty years of mediocrity.
The Great T-Shirt Disaster
In the waning days of the Dean campaign, some of us made T-shirts that attempted to non-non-ironically tap into the growing hipster political consciousness (this was in January 2004, post-Iowa, so before most of the hipster 527s were fully functional). The T-shirts read, “Are you DECK?”, using the hipster replacement term for “cool” that no one uses because “cool” is retro and therefore hip. (It’s a losing battle for hipsters to invent new words to replace old ones, because the very foundation of contemporary hipsterisme is to act like you remember the 1970s, during which you pretended to remember the 1950s. When hipsters shine is when they develop words for entirely new practices, like smirting.)
Underneath “DECK” it read “Dean, Edwards, Clark, Kerry”. Those were the candidates we figured reasonable people should support, in the correct order. We wanted to be inclusive of all the candidates who conceivably could win, to make sure hipsters knew that if they did not vote, they would die (see below). This was potentially a risky move, as the Lieberman camp could have come out with their own “Dreck” shirt.
What’s absurd is I never thought we’d have to go all the way down the T-shirt list to get a nominee. Just as the political blogs read on November 3, “JACK’S FOURTH CHOICE LOSES.”
Media Buys of My Secret Heart
“Cherry Tree”
This was a thirty-second spot I developed in my free time, in conjunction with Peter Jackson, and forgot about until now.
It opened with a small boy in powdered wig and velvet suit taking a big old whack with his axe at a cherry tree. His back is to the camera. From off screen, a colonial voice asks, “George, who chopped down the cherry tree?”
The boy turns to us and it is the digitally miniaturized face of George W. Bush. He grins and through his mind we see economic collapse, the ravages of war, worldwide terrorism, and failed everything. He says, “Not my fault!”
We had trouble producing this incisive, devastating attack on incumbency because I insisted on getting Bush to play himself and he was very difficult to work with.
“Time to Die”
This is an ongoing project with Citizen Change. As you know, Puff Daddy famously asked people to choose the lesser of two evils: Vote or Die. Since the youth voters he (and most of the 527s) were targeting didn’t really turn out in the numbers expected, it’s clear that many preferred to die.
In the post-election season, we are organizing a series of unannounced appearances of Puff Daddy and his entourage in urban markets coast to coast. He will grab a bullhorn and begin screaming that nobody voted, so now they will die, upon which he will personally begin to shoot into the surrounding crowd (with blanks of course). In this way, we will reinvigorate our base and send a strong message to non-voters: we will kill you.
Look for these events in your town, and watch our new ad running during Growing Up Gotti.
Last Thoughts
John Kerry sucks, but only about 95% as much as I had previously suggested. Maybe if I hadn’t been so unyielding in my views, a few more people would have cut him some slack and we would have won a few million extra votes. But it doesn’t matter now, except that millions of people, including most of you slackers, are going to have the life crushed out of them by Grammy-winner Puff Daddy.
Meanwhile, I still get a lot of email about Election 2004, especially from Dick Gephardt. Haven’t they heard the news?
by Jack, November 30, 2004 1:24 PM | More from Election 2004 | More from The Damned Human Race
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I have never heard about "Cherry Tree" before. It's a shame really, I think that might have done the trick.