← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Peter Phillips

American Democracy stinks

Thread ID: 13496 | Posts: 2 | Started: 2004-05-02

Wayback Archive

Peter Phillips [OP]

2004-05-02 15:58 | User Profile

This article would bring familiar feelings of revulsion among people here:

[QUOTE]

Doubting Democrats lose faith in gloomy Kerry Tony Allen-Mills, Philadelphia
[img]http://images.thetimes.co.uk/images/trans.gif[/img]
SHORTLY before Senator John F Kerry arrived in Philadelphia last week to woo a national convention of black American mayors, the Rev Benjamin Hooks provided a masterclass in bringing a crowd to its feet. Revered by African Americans as the first black judge to be appointed in the desegregated South, the 79-year-old civil rights activist claimed to remember the days when there was only one black mayor in the whole of America.
“He was the mayor of Mound Bayou, Mississippi,” said Hooks, a silver-haired preacher who honed his oratorical skills in Baptist pulpits across the South. “The town was so small they had the ‘You are entering Mound Bayou’ sign and the ‘You are leaving Mound Bayou’ sign nailed to the same post.” An hour or so later, after Hooks had been cheered from the stage by an audience of more than 500 black mayors, Kerry arrived to make his pitch as the Democratic candidate for president. Like Hooks, he started with a joke. “What an incredible opportunity this is,” Kerry said. “My staff have got 500 parking tickets in all your towns. I came here to ask you to pardon them.” As his audience tittered nervously — allusions to presidential pardons tend to recall Bill Clinton’s bestowal of favours when he was president — Kerry ploughed into a sobering 45-minute monologue whose central theme was the security of America’s chemical plants. When Hooks ended his speech with a rousing exhortation — “I have heard the voice of Jesus saying, ‘Fight on, fight on’ ” — the whooping and hollering lasted for more than three minutes. When Kerry concluded with a declaration that he, too, would be “fighting on . . . for economic justice and fairness”, the polite applause lasted 17 seconds. While few American politicians could hope to match Hooks for fire or brimstone, Kerry’s strikingly downbeat performance before one of his key constituencies for November’s presidential poll reflected many of the problems afflicting the Democratic campaign at just the moment when President George W Bush appears most vulnerable to attack. To the increasing chagrin of Democratic insiders, Kerry has failed to exploit growing public disquiet over Bush’s conduct of the war in Iraq. Instead he has become embroiled in a disturbing sequence of frequently farcical disputes over his wife’s taxes, what car he drives, what he did with his Vietnam war medals and how much he paid for his latest haircut. After enduring weeks of Republican sniping about his record as a Vietnam hero who turned against the war, and his much-publicised propensity for changing his mind about Iraq and other issues, Kerry is facing a potentially more damaging whispering campaign within his own ranks. Complaints that he is proving a wooden, irritable and dangerously unappealing campaigner have begun to surface in forums traditionally favourable to Democratic candidates. “Senator Kerry’s talent for turning a winning proposition into a losing one is disturbingly reminiscent of Al Gore (the Democratic candidate in 2000), who somehow managed to lose an election he won,” wrote Maureen Dowd, a New York Times columnist who has made a career of bashing Bush. “My candidate is a dour man,” sighed Richard Cohen, a Democratic columnist for The Washington Post. “Sometimes he seems angry, which is not good, but most of the time he just seems gloomy.” The Village Voice, a bastion of liberal sentiment in New York, bluntly declared that the air was “gushing out” of Kerry’s balloon and concluded: “John Kerry must go.” Opinion polls confirm the view of Kerry as an opportunistic figure whose convictions depend on how many votes he thinks he might win. In a CBS News poll published on Thursday, Bush’s approval rating slid to 46%, the lowest level of his presidency. Yet the poll showed Kerry with only a slender election advantage over Bush. Most troubling for the Kerry campaign was the finding that 61% of voters believe that “Kerry says what he thinks people want to hear”. Only 29% think he says what he believes. The results suggest that the Bush campaign tactic of questioning Kerry’s alleged “flip-flops” on policy issues is doing him serious damage. Kerry’s appearance in Philadelphia reinforced the impression that the 60-year-old senator is failing to take the campaign initiative and is too easily distracted by rivals’ attacks. A couple of weeks ago black newspaper columnists began noticing that Kerry’s campaign team was almost exclusively white. The haste with which the campaign stumbled to rectify any suggestion that it was out of touch with minorities failed to convince many blacks and Hispanics. Kerry’s team quickly produced a list of new campaign appointments containing several minority names. By the time he reached Philadelphia it was clear that Kerry had blown his first test of racial sensitivity. Even as he spoke to the black mayors, Latin leaders were accusing him of being “patronising and condescending”. One of the mayors said later: “Kerry ain’t no Bill Clinton. He should take some lessons from Bill.” As he struggles to strike the right note against a president who has endured a torrid year of military reverses in Iraq, Kerry still has plenty in his favour. Yet the doubts about his charisma will not be easily dispelled. After Hooks had spoken in Philadelphia, Harvey Johnson, the mayor of Jackson, Mississippi, shook his head admiringly. “Some people have got fire locked up in their bones,” he said. He was not referring to Kerry. **CLINTONS ACCUSED OF NOT WANTING A DEMOCRAT VICTORY** A FORMER aide to Bill Clinton has become a bitter critic of his wife, Hillary, claiming she will stop at nothing to ensure she wins the presidency in 2008, writes Sarah Baxter. Dick Morris, the private pollster who first served Clinton when he was standing for governor of Arkansas in the late 1970s, went on to become a pivotal figure behind the scenes at the White House. Morris claims in a book out this week that the former first lady is hiding behind a slick “Hillary brand” which appears chatty and warm but is insincere. The title, Rewriting History, is a deliberate riposte to Hillary’s memoir, Living History, a huge bestseller. The Clintons, Morris asserts, are hostile to a victory by John Kerry, the Democrat presidential candidate, which would rob Hillary of the chance to stand when a second George W Bush term expired in 2008. Were Kerry scoring well in the polls, Morris claims, Hillary would be demanding to be his vice-presidential running mate. However, if she sits out the race and Kerry goes on to win, she will not be able to “keep fresh until 2012”, the earliest year she could clinch the Democrat nomination. Hillary has denied she is interested in the vice-presidency. Morris suggests Bill Clinton’s White House memoir, to be published in June, is timed to rob Kerry of the oxygen of coverage at a critical moment in the race. With Hillary on the ticket, the book would have been delayed until after the election, he claims. There is little love lost between Hillary and Morris. In her autobiography she describes the pollster as a “brilliant strategist” who indulges in “histrionics and grandstanding”. She adds: “He has the people skills of a porcupine.”

[/QUOTE]

Source: [url="http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-1094909,00.html"]http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-1094909,00.html[/url]

N.B. Forrest

2004-05-03 02:38 | User Profile

Kohn does indeed suck as an orator. He has an annoyingly lecturing tone, as if he's talking down to a bunch of morons (for the most part he is, but a politician must never let on that he knows it). As for comparing his style to Revvun Hooks, it can't really be done. Crowds expect bloviating niggers like Hooks, "Dr." Kang, Spittin' Jesse & Sharpton to put on a good show by howlin' like inmates of the primate house at the zoo. The jewws like the coons & the spics to be kept on the boil by firebreathing orators, but they want Whitey to stay in his death-stupor. Any White politician who infuses his speeches with similar passion is portrayed by the judenpresse as a nut (Dean), or as too "scary", too "dangerously volatile" to be trusted with power. This, of course, works like a charm on the wimmin.

Shmuel well remembers the wake-the-dead power of Uncle Adolf's speeches, and they still live in fear of another White leader with similar gifts.