ROGER SIMON COLUMN
SEPTEMBER 30, 20004

Simon Says:

When you think about it, hasn't Dan Rather been nuts for years?

Reconsider root beer. It has no caffeine.

There is no better feeling than being on a two-lane road with nobody in
front of you.

It is easy to have your cake and eat it, too. What is difficult is to eat
your cake and have it, too.

How did glove compartments get their name? When were gloves considered so
important that they deserved their own compartment? And why keep your
gloves in the car, where they will get cold?

A trip to the Monterey Aquarium confirms what I have long believed: most
fish have ugly faces.

What the big deal about yoga?

Every restaurant review should tell you how noisy the place is and whether
human speech is in the realm of the possible.

Strollers are becoming like SUVs, they just keep getting bigger and bigger.
(Babies seem to a be about the same size, however.)

I keep hearing about how this presidential election needs to be about
"strength." But aren't we knee deep in testosterone already? Would it be
nice to hear some ideas? And whatever happened to candidates who actually
spent their time inspiring the voters, rather than trying to destroy their
opponents.

It is far, far better to fly Business Class on a 777 than First Class on a
757.

Do butterflies have any natural predators? (And if they don't, how come
they haven't taken over the world?)

Paperback pick of the Month: "Gulag" by Anne Applebaum.

What if it turns out that carbs are good for you?

Nothing is sadder than sad violin music.

For most airplane movies, it makes no difference whether you use the
headset or not.

Really classy restaurants give you liquid sugar for your ice tea.

If you're old enough to drive, you are too old for trick-or-treating.

Things everybody gets wrong:
Mano a mano does not mean man to man nor one on one. It is Spanish for hand to hand.
You don't stand behind a podium. You stand on it. You stand behind a lectern.
A wooden house cannot be dilapidated. Delapitated applies only to objects made of stone.

The latest politically correct movement: encouraging the proliferation of
sharks. Sure sharks eat swimmers, but there are plenty of swimmers and not
that many sharks.

Admit it, you'd love to be Vincent Donofrio just for a week or so.

How come you never look to see which side the gas tank is on before you get
in the rental car?

I understand heirloom tomatoes, but who is leaving them to us?

ROGER SIMON COLUMN
SEPTEMBER 27, 2004

WASHINGTON - - I hate to be the skunk at the lawn party, but the upcoming presidential debates may not be as big a deal as some in the media are making them out to be.

Some are convinced that they will be the pivotal moment in what has been a very long campaign. Many are convinced they will make or break John Kerry.

To which I say: Maybe. But maybe not.

Debates are usually not pivotal events. Debates are usually pretty good at providing a peek at the candidates and how they behave under pressure, but are pretty bad at producing clear winners and losers.

And winners and losers are definitely what the media care about. (Which is why they conduct focus groups, just so they can claim ordinary people have picked winners and losers even when there aren’t any.)

Yet the same members of the media who are now saying how important these debates certainly will be also sat through dozens of primary debates, which didn’t amount to hardly anything.

In fact, the media are usually disappointed by debates, because the only debates that we remember are those with zingers and gaffes and most debates don’t have those.

Everybody remembers the second Michael Dukakis-George H.W. Bush debate in 1988 because of Dukakis’ seemingly cold response to a question about the imaginary killer and rapist of his wife. But who remembers the first Dukakis-Bush debate that year? Hardly anybody. There were no zingers.

Further there is a certain silliness to debates that is hard to overlook. First, there is the absurdity of all the prep and all the rehearsals. Aren’t Bush and Kerry supposed to know the issues already? So what are they rehearsing except their theatrical skills?

“Most prep is total bull----,” one former Democratic debate prepper told me. “You got it or you don’t got it. You either come across as genuine or you don’t come across as genuine.” Maybe. But don’t tell the candidates that. They are rehearsing like mad.

The biggest problem with over-emphasizing debates, however, is that debates are totally unreal. The defense of the current debate format, in which the candidates are peppered with questions and an instant response is demanded, is that it is designed to show us how the candidates perform under pressure. (Which is the same rationale the Miss America pageant uses to defend the swimsuit competition.)

In real life, however, the heat generated by a debate is nothing like the pressure of the Oval Office. In real life, rarely does a president have to come up with immediate answers to provocative questions without consulting anybody (except at press conferences, which are also pure theater).

During a debate, I have never heard a candidate pause and say, “I’d like to think about that for a few moments before I answer.” Or, “I’d like to consult with my staff and some experts before I give you a reply.”

If a candidate said either of those things, the media would tear him apart. But why? Both replies are reasonable and much closer to how a president actually operates.

Do we really want our presidents making dramatic, theatric, off-the-cuff decisions on important matters?

Haven’t we had too much of that already?

ROGER SIMON COLUMN
SEPTEMBER 20, 2004

WASHINGTON - - It has taken John Kerry several months to decide that he now wants to be Howard Dean.

Last year, Dean shocked many Democratic stalwarts and political experts by the vigor of his attack on the Iraq war and the harsh words he directed against George Bush.

Many thought that vituperative attacks against an opponent (remember all those articles about how “angry” Howard Dean was?) might seem like a good idea because it energized your base, but that it was a mistake because it alienated moderate swing voters, who really determined the outcome of elections.

Dean thought this was hooey.

"Karl Rove [President Bush's political guru] discovered it, too, but I discovered it independently," Dean told me, adding that the theory is embodied in the writings of George Lakoff, a professor of cognitive science and linguistics at the University of California-Berkeley. "What you do is crank the heck out of your base, get them really excited and crank up the base turnout and you'll win the middle-of-the-roader."

The reason, according to Dean, was that swing voters share the characteristics of both parties and eventually go with whichever party excites them the most.

"Democrats appeal to them on their softer side - - the safety net - - but the Republicans appeal to them on the harder side - - the discipline, the responsibility, and so forth," Dean said. "So the question is which side appears to be energetic, deeply believing in its message, deeply committed to bringing a vision of hope to America. That side is the side that gets the swing voters and wins."

Howard Dean did not win the Democratic nomination, of course. But that doesn’t mean his theory was not without value, which the Kerry campaign now seems to accept.

As if awakening from a slumber, John Kerry has roused himself and is now on the attack.

“I am absolutely taking the gloves off,” he told Don Imus last Wednesday. The next day, Kerry gave a speech in Las Vegas in which he accused President Bush of misleading the public about Iraq, of playing politics with national security, of mismanaging the war on terror and of “living in a fantasy world of spin.”

You can’t get much tougher than that without having the president’s security detail wrestle you to the ground.

With both sides finally joining the fray, the base voters of each side are now being fed so much red meat their cholesterol ratings must be about 600.

Why was it necessary for Kerry to shift to offense? Because George Bush had reversed the conventional wisdom that elections involving incumbent presidents are always about the president.

Such elections are usually report cards on the incumbents and you can see why Bush - - who presides over a shaky economy and a controversial foreign occupation - - might not want to see what his grade was.

But his election team has very effectively made this campaign not about Bush, but about Kerry.

Is Kerry a flip-flopper? Did he lie about Vietnam? Is his position on Iraq - - and this is really catching on - - “incoherent”?

Kerry helped the Bush campaign enormously by being slow to react. (And his glacial pace in attacking the smear campaign of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth was especially inexplicable considering that the last time Kerry fired his campaign manager was because his campaign was too slow in meeting Howard Dean’s attacks during the primary.)

Bill Clinton said a couple of years ago that ''when people are insecure, they'd rather have somebody who's strong and wrong than somebody who's weak and right.''

Was John Kerry not listening to this? (Obviously it would be better to find candidates who are strong and right, but these days you take what you can get.)

There are dangers for Kerry in going on offense. Another popular wisdom holds that negative campaigning depresses turnout by alienating voters. And since Kerry is doing much better in the polls among registered voters than likely voters, he obviously wants the turnout to be as large as possible.

But what choice does he have? Slumber on and get beaten senseless by the GOP attack machine? Or attack Bush, goose the Democratic base and hope the middle follows?

True, Kerry will have to go some to equal Dick Cheney’s assertion that if Kerry is elected, the United States will be attacked again by terrorists. And even though the White House and Cheney later “walked back” that statement, the political ploy of attack and walk-back is an old one. (It gets you twice as much publicity for the original attack.)

The Republicans know how to do this stuff, and the Kerry campaign seems to be just learning.

Why? Perhaps because for years the Democrats have been cranking out political consultants while the Republicans have been cranking out political assassins.

So here’s the question of this campaign: Can the Democrats close that gap in time?

ROGER SIMON COLUMN
SEPTEMBER 15, 2004

WASHINGTON - - Winning the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people is a major goal of the Bush administration since this seems to be the best way to get the Iraqis to stop killing us.

Though our troops came as liberators, they are now seen as occupiers. What’s worse, they are seen as targets.

And am I the only one who wonders why the Iraqis are not more grateful to us for freeing them from their evil dictator, Saddam Hussein? Don’t they know how much better off they are today? Don’t they listen to President Bush’s speeches?

Yet not only do U.S. combat deaths now exceed 1,000, but the pace of attacks on U.S. forces has increased and it seems clear that Iraq is less safe for Americans now than it was at the beginning of our occupation.

This is not progress.

Further, we are getting trapped in the familiar “cycle of violence”, where attack begets response, which begets new attack, etc.

From the front page of the Washington Post Monday came this chilling story: “A U.S. military helicopter fired into a crowd of civilians who had surrounded a burning Army armored vehicle in the capital, killing 13 people, said Saad Amili, spokesman for the Health Ministry….The U.S. military said it was trying to scatter looters who were attempting to make off with ammunition and pieces of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, which had been hit by a car bomb early in the morning on Haifa Street, a troublesome north-south artery west of the Tigris River.”

Why is that so chilling? Because in Baghdad U.S. force are now firing into crowds of civilians to try “to scatter looters.” I would imagine that in post-war Iraq - - a poor country to begin with - - looting has become a way of life for many. But is firing missiles into a crowd of unarmed people the best way to prevent it?

I am sure the U.S. military is upset that the civilians were trying to steal ammunition that could later be used against U.S. forces. But we are also told there are vast, virtually unguarded Iraqi weapons caches throughout the country and the insurgents we are fighting do not seem to be hampered by a lack of ammunition.

But now those insurgents have a new recruiting tool, what the British newspaper, the Independent, is already calling “the slaughter in Haifa Street.”

Those sources are either foreign or liberal, you say. Well, there is this from the front page of the Wall Street Journal Wednesday: “Iraq's once highly fragmented insurgent groups are increasingly cooperating to attack U.S. and Iraqi government targets, and steadily gaining control of more areas of the country.”

Got that? The insurgents are controlling more of Iraq now than they did when the occupation began. You can call the U.S. effort many things and one of those things seems to be “losing.”

And because the insurgents are doing so well, the United States is shifting funds away from those rebuilding projects that were supposed to win hearts and minds - - providing water and electricity, for instance - - to military and police forces.

We really have no choice. As the Journal states: “The shift marks a recognition that Iraq's security condition is worsening rapidly and that without more local troops and police, the rebuilding effort cannot proceed.”

You may wonder what we have to show for our efforts in Iraq so far. Well, an increasing casualty rate for one. According to the Journal, “August’s 1,300 wounded was the highest monthly combat-injury total since the war began.”

When it will all end, nobody knows. John Kerry, as if awakening from a long slumber, is finally starting to attack Bush on the war in Iraq in new, more stark terms.

“But you know and I know, Americans know and the world knows…that the situation in Iraq is worse, not better, that whole parts of Iraq are in the control of terrorists," Kerry said at a campaign stop in Ohio this week. “I know what we need to do in Iraq and the world to fight a more effective war on terror.…I know how we can reduce the number of terrorists in the world, how we can get other countries in the world to join us."

Now if he would just tell the rest of us.

ROGER SIMON COLUMN
SEPTEMBER 13, 2004

WASHINGTON - - The guns of August did their work on John F. Kerry. Whatever good will and political advantage he had obtained from his convention in Boston - - and that was slender enough - - it was shredded by a withering attack on his Vietnam record and Kerry's own glacial pace in defending himself.

Which put the leaders of the Democratic Party in a cold fury. The Democratic National Committee had spent a record $36 million on television ads in August, and some now considered that a wasted effort. Big Democratic donors were howling that Kerry was blowing the chance of a lifetime and well before the Republican Convention, which placed Kerry even further in the hole, Bill Clinton was on the phone with Kerry and telling him his campaign needed to be "stronger".

Fingers were pointed in several directions, but grumpy staff members, who bore the brunt of the blame, pointed out that the candidate was not helping. A few weeks before the Republican Convention, I asked a senior Kerry aide where Kerry would spend that week. "I don't know where he will be, but I know where he won't be," the aide replied. "He will not be on Nantucket."

The staff got it. Pictures of Kerry windsurfing around an island playground for the wealthy were not helpful. So what happens? Kerry goes to Nantucket, goes windsurfing, and, as if to rub it in, puts on a pair of only-a-rich-guy-would-dare-wear-these shorts for the photographers.

And if the Democrats were waiting for Bush to falter at his convention, they were badly disappointed. It was a nearly flawless four-day extravaganza and virtually every major speech had the same theme: Vote for George Bush - - or die.

While Kerry's convention looked relentlessly backward to Vietnam, Bush's convention looked insistently ahead to a dangerous world that only Bush, the official line went, could protect us from.

And if anyone needed reminding of that following the convention, Dick Cheney provided it with his statement that if Kerry was elected "the danger is that we'll get hit again" by terrorists.

But now it was September and a new Kerry campaign was in place. A number of former Clinton aides had been brought on board and as one told me, "This campaign needs to be more urgent, more aggressive and more in your face." The new people also pointed out that after eight years of working in the Clinton White House, "rapid response" was stamped on their DNA.

So John Edwards immediately denounced Cheney's statement as "un-American," and when media accounts surfaced that Bush may not have fulfilled all his military obligations during his stint in the Air National Guard, TV-star and Kerry backer James Carville was unleashed to say: "I think the lesson here is President Bush is probably a man of limited personal courage."

The candidate, himself, also seemed a little more emphatic and more willing to focus his speeches on just one or two topics (instead of 16) and present a presidential, if not exactly warm and likeable face, to the public.

But is it all too late? "Our biggest problem in August was that it was an opportunity lost," a top Kerry aide said. "So many things went wrong for Bush - - bad poverty numbers, the economy, Iraq - - and we did not hold him accountable. That was more damaging to us than the Swift Boat stuff."

But Kerry is known as being a good closer, a candidate who comes to life in the last weeks of the campaign to make up lost ground and win. Though his campaign is depending on more than just the candidate.

Senior aides feel they have a secret weapon: a below-the-radar screen staff of experts on organizing and getting out the vote. "While there is a lot of drama surrounding the media consultants and the press people, there are people with a ruthless efficiency on this campaign concentrating on the political, targeting and ground-game side," a Democratic strategist said.

Said Democratic Chairman Terry McAuliffe: "I think the second the Republican convention ended, it was a new campaign for us. There is a whole new level of intensity." Now if someone could just convince the candidate of that.

ROGER SIMON COLUMN
SEPTEMBER 8, 2004

Simon Says:

I'll bet you have desk drawers that you have not opened in years.

Three things that are absolutely useless to tell another person:
“Just relax.”
“Try not to think about it.”
“Don't worry.”

There are Letterman people and there are Leno people. And they always marry each other.

It is a shame more members of Congress are not putting up a fight to preserve the assault weapons ban, which expires Monday. According to a recent University of Pennsylvania National Annenberg Election Survey, “68 percent of the American public wants Congress to extend the ten-year old ban on assault weapons.” Further: “Support for extending the…prohibition on manufacturing 19 types of semi-automatic rifles and shotguns and on ammunition clips holding more than ten rounds was also registered by 57 percent of people with a gun in their household and even by 32 percent of members of the National Rifle Association, the politically influential organization which adamantly opposes the ban.” Highest levels of support came from women (71 percent), people with college degrees (75 percent), liberals (75 percent), people living in the Northeast (73 percent), Hispanics (75 percent) and Democrats (73 percent.) But get this: “In no ordinary demographic group did support go below 60 percent. The lowest levels were recorded by Republicans (61 percent), residents of rural areas (61 percent), conservatives (62 percent), and 18 to 29 year-olds (63 percent).” One of Bill Clinton’s greatest achievements was to make gun control a mainstream issue. But how much did you hear about it at the Democratic Convention this year?

I don't know anyone who eats full-size carrots anymore.

When is the last time you saw someone use a coin-changer? (And if you don’t know what a coin-changer is, you never rode a bus in Olden Times or bought an ice cream bar from a Good Humor man.)

The reason people scream into their cell phones is because they can’t hear their own voice in the earpiece like on a regular phone. So why doesn’t somebody invent a cell phone that does that?

And while we are on the subject, has anyone ever really pressed 5 to leave a call-back number?

I hate to be a stickler (which is a lie; I love being a stickler) but I keep reading how the 2000 presidential election was the “closest race” in U.S. history. Nope. Gore’s margin of victory in the popular vote was almost five times the size of John F. Kennedy’s margin over Richard Nixon in 1960. Nor was the electoral vote margin the closest in history. Bush won in the electoral college by five votes, four more than Rutherford B. Hayes’s single vote margin in 1876.

Does any police dispatcher still say, “Calling all cars”?

Tell me that ad for a refrigerator with a television in the door is a joke.

My favorite quotation from the Republican Convention came during a lunch with Don Evans, the Commerce Secretary. Evans is a long-time friend and huge supporter of George Bush. Evans would probably admit that when it comes to Bush, Evans has “drunk the Kool Aid” (a term favored by reporters, which is a reference to Jim Jones and Guyana, where, in point of fact, Jones’s followers drank grape Flavor Aid and not grape Kool Aid, but only a stickler would point that out). For example, Evans said of Bush: “He is a man with an incredibly balanced life mentally, physically and spiritually. His faith is serve to other people and lift other people up. Those who know him best, like him most. Ever since I have known him he has had an incredible drive to serve others. He doesn’t think about him, he thinks about you. He has an amazing resolve, discipline and commitment to continue to serve America.” But here, from Evans, is the best quote of the convention: “The president believes in America, American-made products and American-made people.” And speaking as an American-made person, I am glad he does.

Why do I always break out in a sweat, when I have to use a coupon in a grocery store?

ROGER SIMON COLUMN
SEPTEMBER 6, 2004

WASHINGTON - - If John Kerry loses his presidential bid, analysts will point to the Democratic Convention as the time and place that he began losing it.

Kerry made his convention - - just as he has made his campaign - - about Vietnam, a divisive, controversial war that most Americans would just as soon forget.

From high-profile appearances and endorsements by his fellow swift boat veterans to the salute he gave at the beginning of his acceptance speech, the convention seemed to be about events that happened more than three decades ago and not events that are happening now.

Nor did Kerry use his acceptance speech to clear the air about a fundamental problem that his campaign faces and that his opponents beat him over the head with on a daily basis: Kerry’s seemingly conflicting votes over the Iraq war.

By comparison, the Republican convention was anchored in the present with one clear and simple message: Vote for George W. Bush - - or die.

Every speaker that I can recall (with the exception of Laura Bush) gave the same speech and that speech told the same story: We live in times of grave peril and only George W. Bush can safeguard the homeland from it. Turning this nation over to a vacillating and naïve challenger, speaker after speaker said, would be tantamount to national suicide.

Even the so-called social moderates in the party - - Rudy Giuliani, Arnold Schwarzenegger and, to some extent, John McCain - - made this point.

In addition, they were adept at rewriting recent history to suit current political necessity: Speaker after speaker at the Republican Convention said we had invaded Iraq in order to topple an evil dictator.

I don’t remember it that way. I remember the Bush administration saying we had to invade Iraq because Saddam Hussein had vast stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction and was, therefore, a clear and present danger to the region and the world.

The second re-writing of history that took place at the convention was even more convenient: We toppled Saddam Hussein in order to combat terrorism and punish those who attacked our country on Sept. 11. Yet critics point out that no link between Saddam and the Sept. 11 attacks has ever been proven and that, in fact, by re-directing our forces away from Afghanistan to fight in Iraq, we may have weakened our assault on al Qaeda and terrorism.

In any case, the argument for re-electing Bush having been made in such hot-button terms by others, Bush could afford to give a calm, cool, personable acceptance speech that strengthened the view that whatever his failings, he is a reasonable and likeable leader.

The bounce he got out of his convention and his speech was, according to Time and Newsweek, a very impressive 11 percent (pollsters had told us such a big bounce was impossible because there are so few undecided voters, but pollsters are often wrong) and while that margin may soon fade, it is bad news for the flailing Kerry campaign.

The same mistake that beset Kerry in the beginning stages of the Democratic primaries - - failure to defend himself often and early from the attacks of Howard Dean - - has beset him again: Failure to react quickly and vigorously to the attacks of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, depending instead on the responsibility of the media (ho-ho) to refuse to publicize the largely false accusations.

Kerry is now busy trying to solve the problem by adding new staffers to his campaign - - getting rid of people would lead to bad publicity, so an already swollen staff is growing even more bloated - - though some fear a larger staff will mean an even slower response time.

Kerry is far from out of this race - - bad economics at home and the quagmire that is the occupation of Iraq are his allies - - but he needs to be more nimble and more focused and make some kind of emotional connection with voters.

Kerry can also keep talking about Vietnam if he wants to, but I have a feeling most voters would much rather hear him talk about tomorrow than yesterday.

ROGER SIMON COLUMN
SEPTEMBER 1, 2004

NEW YORK - - Republican insiders have been huddling in small groups at the Republican Convention this week and talking about what worries them most. It is not John Kerry. It is not the unemployment numbers. It is not Iraq.

It is Kitty Kelley.

Kelley has a new book coming out in a few weeks titled "The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty” and it is rumored to be explosive.

One source tells me there are “at least five bombshells” contained in it and another source says there is allegedly new material on President Bush’s service in the Air National Guard.

Democrats have long been worried about a Republican “October Surprise” such as the capture of Osama bin Laden. But now some Republicans are worried that Kelley’s book will be the equivalent of an October surprise and harmful to President Bush’s re-election hopes.

Why are GOP operatives taking such a book seriously? After all, some critics have dismissed Kelley’s previous books as the equivalent of tabloid journalism. But in November 2000, the Bush campaign’s internal polling showed that revelations about Bush’s 1976 arrest for driving under the influence of alcohol damaged him badly with religious conservatives and some analysts believe it cost him a popular vote victory.

So this time, Bush operatives don’t want any more big surprises, revelations, rumors or gossip to make a media splash just weeks before the election.

Which is why they are so nervous. According to the Associated Press, the Kelley opus - - it is supposed to be around 700 pages long - - is being billed as "the book the Bushes don't want you to read,” it has a first printing of 600,000 and “a virtual guarantee to annoy, if not embarrass, Bush supporters.”

In the past, Kelley has written books about Nancy Reagan, Frank Sinatra and the British Royal Family among others and her books have often contained explosive material. Kelley’s facts are sometimes challenged, but her books tend to make a big splash nonetheless.

Kelley’s 1991 book on Nancy Reagan, for example, which contained scandalous accusations, was the subject of a front page story in the New York Times by Maureen Dowd.

“Ms. Kelley has developed a reputation as a giant killer for her sensational books about the rich and famous,” Dowd wrote. “She wrote that Jacqueline Kennedy had shock treatments; that President John F. Kennedy's retarded sister, Rosemary, had a lobotomy, and that Frank Sinatra's mother was a New Jersey abortionist.”

Dowd went on: “Ms. Kelley asserts that Mrs. Reagan will go down in history as the cold and glittering icon for a morally vacuous era. The author says the former First Lady reinvented herself with a tissue of fabrications about her background, age and family, just as her free-spirited mother did before her; that she had her nose fixed and her eyes lifted; that both the Reagans had extramarital affairs, and that Mrs. Reagan had a long-term affair with Frank Sinatra.”

The article quoted Sheila Tate, Nancy Reagan's former press secretary, as saying that "no friend of Nancy Reagan's is going to read that scummy book."

Perhaps, but plenty of other people did read it and many more read about it. And this, remember, was in an era before 24-hour cable TV and media with an insatiable appetite for news, gossip, rumor, innuendo or whatever they can get.

It may turn out, of course, that Kelley’s new book contains nothing damaging to President Bush.

But with their convention going so well, Republicans have to find something to worry about this week.