Triviality and explanations

I wonder if John Kerry has perhaps launched his descent into caricature a couple of months too early.

Usually, the successful losing candidate waits till late spring/early summer before shifting gears and beginning each day with the campaign trying to explain some rhetorical triviality from the previous week that has stuck to his shoe and that he can’t seem to shake off.

Ever since last summer, I’ve been mocking Sen. Kerry’s tortured explanations of why his vote in favor of such-and-such in fact demonstrates his staunch opposition to it. As I wrote a couple of months back:

“His vote against the first Gulf war was, he says, a sign of his support for the first Gulf war. Whereas his vote in favor of the Iraq war was a sign of his opposition to the Iraq war. And his vote against funding America’s troops in Iraq is a sign of his support for America’s men and women in uniform. On the same principle, I think the best way voters this November can demonstrate their support for John Kerry is by voting against him.”

Even I, though, would have balked at so crude and obvious a parody as this line some Kerry impersonator did on the radio the other day:

“I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it.”

Oh, hang on. That’s apparently the real senator, explaining to an audience of veterans why he voted against funding the Iraqi reconstruction:

“I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it.” Got that?

Q: How many John Kerrys does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: At least four. One to unscrew the old light bulb. One to simultaneously announce his courageous commitment to replacing the old bulb. One to vote against funding the new light bulb. And one to denounce George W Bush and America’s Benedict Arnold CEOs for leaving everyone in the dark.

Q: Why did John Kerry cross the road?

A: He didn’t cross the road. He crossed to the middle to demonstrate his grasp of all the nuances and subtleties involved in crossing the road, and was still explaining them to the New York Times reporter when the logging truck hit him.

Then there was the senator’s clumsy attempt to declare himself America’s “second black president.” Bill Clinton was at least canny enough to get himself anointed as the first black president by an actual black person, the novelist Toni Morrison, who declared he displayed “every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas.”

It’s harder to pull that off when you’re a Swiss finishing school boy from Massachusetts. Many’s the night John and the other boys in his dorm would lie awake dreaming of their freedom as they murmured one of the traditional spirituals of their people: “Swing by, sweet limousine, comin’ for to carry me home.”

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