FAIR: Pundits to Kerry: "Move right"

[Armstead]

This is a press release from Fairness and Accuracy in Media. So am posting in full.

http://www.commondreams.org/news2004/0409-07.htm

Pundits to Kerry: Move Right - Same Advice Every Four Years

WASHINGTON - April 9 - Every four years, loud voices in the media advise the Democratic presidential candidate to abandon progressive stances and occupy the political center. With Sen. John Kerry having emerged as the presumable nominee, the pundits are once again issuing the same prescription.

Time magazine's Joe Klein wrote (4/12/04) that Kerry needs to be bold: "The ideal step would be to make John McCain his choice for vice president and announce a government of national reconciliation composed of moderate Democrats and Republicans." Klein recommended making a "radical move to the middle, a campaign that looks and sounds different from the usual partisan claptrap."

Over at Newsweek (4/12/04), political reporter Howard Fineman had the same advice. In a column based on what anonymous "wise guys" are saying, Fineman says Kerry needs to craft "a coherent, centrist vision." As Fineman puts it, "There's room in the middle, wise guys insist." To Fineman and his unnamed experts, "Kerry can't occupy the center if he's defined as a mere liberal. He has the most liberal voting record in the Senate. What to do?" Fineman has the cure: Kerry should "run ads in battleground states reminding voters that he was a prosecutor and that he voted for welfare reform in 1996, a brave (for Massachusetts) stand that drew picketers to his home."

(Incidentally, the claim that Kerry has "the most liberal voting record in the Senate" is dubious. National Journal-- 2/27/04-- ranked him as having the most liberal record in 2003-- a finding based on candidate Kerry's votes on only 25 out of the 62 votes that the publication ranked as either liberal or conservative. In a more comprehensive, less subjective ordering of senators by voting-- voteview.uh.edu-- Kerry was the 25th most liberal voter, right in the center of the Democratic Party.)

And New York Times columnist Tom Friedman wrote on March 27 about his political dreams: "I want to wake up and read that John Kerry just asked John McCain to be his vice president." Friedman explained that's the only way to tackle the country's problems, "with a bipartisan spirit and bipartisan team."

The notion that the Democrats' problem is that they are too far left has been conventional wisdom for so long (Extra!, 9/92) that it's worth noting that this is not the only possible diagnosis. Many elections are won by the party most able to energize its base, which is why the Republicans have several times won the presidency with candidates who quite consciously moved away from the center, toward their party's ideological pole. Candidates who alienate their base-- for example, a Democrat who picked an anti-abortion running mate, or ran by touting support for limits on welfare-- are not guaranteed to pick up enough support from the center to make up for diminished support from their own side.

Both Walter Mondale in 1984 and Michael Dukakis in 1988 took the pundits' move-to-the-right advice-- with little notable success. "Democrats' Platform Shows a Shift From Liberal Positions of 1976 and 1980" was a New York Times headline in 1984 (7/22/84). The selection of conservative Sen. Lloyd Bentsen as Dukakis' running mate, wrote David Broder at the time (Washington Post, 7/14/88), "sent an unmistakable message to the activist constituencies of the Democratic Party that the days of litmus-test liberalism are over." Of course, after both Mondale and Dukakis were defeated in landslides, the conventional wisdom was that they hadn't moved to the right far enough.

[PROGRESSIVE1]

1. The pundits need to jump over a cliff onto a bed of hard, sharp rocks!

Kerry is fine right where he is. And let's stop this crap about McCain being VP. McCain is a partisan hack that supports *!!!

Friedman is an America-Hating Fascist.

:mad:

[Imperialism Inc.]

3. But maybe he could just say * fooled him in to it all, and that

he doesn't really support his stuff, he only voted for it. I think people would buy it. It could work.

[Warpy]

2. They want him to lose to Chimp

That can be the only explanation. Moving to the right means promising more of the same policies that have caused government to crow "economic boom" while working people fall farhter and father behind as their FICA is looted to pay for tax cuts to plutocrats, their wages fall (if they still have jobs), and their benefits evaporate.

What is really needed is a message to the working people of this country, that the disastrous policy of fattening rich people at their expense for the past 40 years has run its course, and now must be turned back around. THIS is what people are waiting to hear!

Moving to the right has been a sure loser strategey. It didn't work for Gore, and it sure didn't work in the midterm elections in 2002.

[sangha]

4. Look at the pundits they name

Klein, Fineman, and Friedman.

I heard Limbaugh also wants Kerry to move to the right. I wonder why they didn't mention his name?

[AntiCoup2K4]

5. Because nobody would believe Mush was part of the "liberal" media

Like the other whores quoted.

And if Kerry moved any farther to the right than he has the last three years, he'd fall off the planet.