I came across two articles this morning that have the distinct air of pundits "hedging their bets" on the possibility of a Kerry victory. If Kerry wins, which it's now dawning on even the Big Pundits is a real possibility (though in FoxWorld it may not have emerged yet, I don't know), the press will need a new script for what happened.
The first one I came across was this piece, whose heading seems to be sensible enough. Conventional wisdom has to be sensible, of course: "Chill, George. It's Kerry's Turn: He won't squander American lives, condone torture, or let God and underlings do his thinking. By my book, that makes the challenger pretty cool" by Ciro Scotti Business Week online 10/29/04.
But don't expect much from the rest of the column. In fact, I stopped reading after this bit of incisive political analysis in the fourth paragraph:
Bush remains a strong and attractive candidate on many levels. I have a 5-year-old daughter, to whom he has such a visceral appeal that she cried when during the Republican National Convention someone spoke harshly about the President on TV.
Yes, the five-year-old demographic is a major belweather of political trends. Moving right along ...
This second is from a British commentator in another of the Rupert Murdoch properties, the London Times. Anatole Kaletsky often has some good commentary. And this looks pretty serviceable as a new conventional wisdom: Reject this failed statesman by Anatole Kaletsky Times of London 10/29/04 ("statesman" for George W. Bush, that's cute):
He inherited a prosperous, peaceful, law-abiding country which was universally admired around the world. He promised, if elected, to govern as a “compassionate conservative”, to end partisan confrontation in Washington and to run a “humble” foreign policy which would respect other countries and show restraint in the use of America’s global power.
Four years later, he presides over a struggling economy, the steepest four-year loss of jobs since the Great Depression, and now has the biggest budget deficits and trade imbalances on record. Far worse, he started an unnecessary war on false pretences and mismanaged it so disastrously that the instability of the Middle East is probably now a greater danger to world peace than the Soviet Union was during the Cold War. The President has failed in his primary military mission of capturing or killing Osama bin Laden and destroying al-Qaeda.
Even the task of eliminating the Taleban and stopping the flow of fundamentalist teachings from Saudi Arabia has proved too much. Imagine the state of the world today if instead of invading Iraq, America had finished the job against Saudi Arabia, the Taleban and al-Qaeda. If, for example, Mr Bush had devoted a fraction of the military manpower and the $200 billion wasted in Iraq on rebuilding Afghanistan that benighted country would soon be the Switzerland of the Himalayas.
Okay, so maybe the part where he seems to advocate military action against Saudi Arabia isn't quite so "sensible." But Britain still has a real press corps, not just the Potemkin variety that we have to endure in the American press.
Yet earlier in that same article, he repeats one of the dingier pieces of the conventional wisdom from the Stolen Election of 2000: that the gaping flaws in the US electoral process "reflect the strengths of American democracy as much as its weakness."
Proving that a columnist for a paper in Britain owned by a rightwing publisher can be just as goofy as some of his American counterparts. See Tom Tomorrow, Proof the system works 10/27/04, for a glance at this sad moment in the history of the American "press corps."
If Bush and the Scalia Five come through, though, this will be a minor flash in the pan. The conventional wisdom can go back to fawning about Bush's "strong leadership" and his "determined stand against The Terrorists" and so on. But otherwise, the new conventional wisdom is starting to emerge from its cocoon.
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