Well, well, well, John Kerry wins again..and again...and again. Yaaaawn! The Dems are getting all fired up about the candidate who has "the best chance to beat Bush." Fine. I want Bush to lose, too. But, really, how different are these guys? Sure, we can go to the Kerry campaign website and read all about his stances, or we can go to kerry.senate.gov and read all about what he's done in the Chamber. Hardly unbiased, of course, but think about how many people really go to similar places to learn about candidates. Think about how many people REALLY think there is a difference between the Republican and Democratic nominees for President. I'm sure the partisans out there will click to the aforementioned websites (or to their favorite biased pieces of cyberspace), read all the issues, and create a sturdy list of points that show how Bush and Kerry differ GREATLY from one another. Booooring...and obvious.
The real challenge is to go out there and find a well-rounded take on the candidates. The well-rounded approach will certainly take more time and, inevitably, lead to some fictitious garbage, but it may open minds (gasp!) to new ideas ("He did NOT just write..."). The more that one reads proves that Bush and Kerry are just different sides of the same coin.
For starters, how about pedigree and privilege. Thanks to, for example, the AOL Time-Warner empire, Americans have an understanding--not accurate or thorough, however--of the Bush Family History. (For other takes, read Russell Bowen's The Immaculate Deception or J.H. Hatfield's Fortunate Son.) But what do people really know about John Forbes Kerry? By now, everyone must know that Kerry comes from patrician ancestry [The Boston Forbes family (maternal)--and not the publishers from NY/NJ--gained wealth from real estate development & holdings and from Boston-China trade; the Winthrop family (also on mother's side) settled Boston and produced one of Massachusett's first governors, if I remember correctly). It's true that these familial ties did not make Kerry rich in the Kennedy-Bush "My Daddy made a lot of money illicitly or unfairly" kind of way (Kerry's dad was Foreign Service and mom didn't work/volunteered), but he certainly lived a life of privilege.
Kerry thanks his rich Forbes and Winthrop aunts for providing boarding school, prep school, Yale, and access to summer homes in NE and Europe, high culture, and unlimited...well, everything. Even more than that, this link to the Yankee Brahmin society (from which the Bush Clan also hails) provided access to families--rich, powerful, influential families like the Kennedys, the Bundys, the Pershings, and others. Of course, we all know that the access didn't stop there. Thanks to the right women, Kerry kept on being a boy from modest means--as I'm sure the DNC will promote--who just happened to fall into wealth, power, and privilege.
I'm sure that everyone knows that he married into enormous wealth twice (Thorne Family = $200-400M on Wall Street; Heinz Family = $500-600M in consumer goods). Sure, we've read that campaign finance laws and a pre-nup preclude him from dipping into the Heinz fortune and that we'd be fools to think that Julia Thorne will give him any money. Buuuut, there are loop-holes and work-arounds for everything. For example, Heinz said that she'd use the fortune ONLY if the Repubs starting slinging mud and attacking her husband in the media. (Get ready to write those ketchup-colored checks early, T-Mama...) And, as for the Thorne riches, well, John Kerry is very close to his two daughters from the first marriage, and those two aren't fond of Teresa's intrusion into their post-divorce happy li'l father-daughter relationships. Speculating a tad here, the daughters are both over 21 and--surprise!--would be willing and able, I'm sure, to tap into the Thorne fortune to help dad's run for the White House, but, more assuredly, to try to one-up Teresa in the attention-getting department (meeeow!). Campaign finance reform be damned! John Forbes Kerry has a lot of money (he mortgaged his $6M house for the campaign..big deal!), and the elite rich have always had ways of getting around everything (see Bush, George Walker).
"So what?" I'm sure you're asking, or maybe you're thinking "You must be jealous or paranoid or worse...a communist!" Hardly. I just like to announce that the emperor wears no clothes. The populace is hoodwinked by Kerry because he's a Democrat, the candidate that helps the working class, the middle class, single mothers, inner-city children, over-worked farmers, and so on. Running as a Democrat doesn't make all that "help" become reality though. The American public, as it stares into the blue flicker of CNN or Nightline or Fox News, must remember ALL these Kerry biographical tidbits as they watch him hop around the country, with his shirt-sleeves rolled up, relentlessly bleating Primary rhetoric (go to the left/right in the primary; come back to the center at the convention) and getting in touch with regular folks west of Beacon Hill or south of the Russell Building. I hope that people take the time to see beyond JohnKerry.com or Kerry's Senate website or The Washington Post or that declawed Tim Russert (Et tu, Brute?) because, if they do, they'll see, once again, that the duopoly serves up two candidates with just different sides of rhetoric.
So what does all this mean to me? Well, for Bush to lose, which is what I want, there must be support for the Democratic nominee. If Kerry is the nominee, then, I want to hear all sides of his story, the good, the bad, and the ugly, before I'll punch the card for him in Cook County. I'm not going to vote for this guy just because he's a potential Bush-Killer. My choice takes into consideration more than one issue and MUCH more than the corporate media or partisan sheep-herding offer up.
The real challenge is to go out there and find a well-rounded take on the candidates. The well-rounded approach will certainly take more time and, inevitably, lead to some fictitious garbage, but it may open minds (gasp!) to new ideas ("He did NOT just write..."). The more that one reads proves that Bush and Kerry are just different sides of the same coin.
For starters, how about pedigree and privilege. Thanks to, for example, the AOL Time-Warner empire, Americans have an understanding--not accurate or thorough, however--of the Bush Family History. (For other takes, read Russell Bowen's The Immaculate Deception or J.H. Hatfield's Fortunate Son.) But what do people really know about John Forbes Kerry? By now, everyone must know that Kerry comes from patrician ancestry [The Boston Forbes family (maternal)--and not the publishers from NY/NJ--gained wealth from real estate development & holdings and from Boston-China trade; the Winthrop family (also on mother's side) settled Boston and produced one of Massachusett's first governors, if I remember correctly). It's true that these familial ties did not make Kerry rich in the Kennedy-Bush "My Daddy made a lot of money illicitly or unfairly" kind of way (Kerry's dad was Foreign Service and mom didn't work/volunteered), but he certainly lived a life of privilege.
Kerry thanks his rich Forbes and Winthrop aunts for providing boarding school, prep school, Yale, and access to summer homes in NE and Europe, high culture, and unlimited...well, everything. Even more than that, this link to the Yankee Brahmin society (from which the Bush Clan also hails) provided access to families--rich, powerful, influential families like the Kennedys, the Bundys, the Pershings, and others. Of course, we all know that the access didn't stop there. Thanks to the right women, Kerry kept on being a boy from modest means--as I'm sure the DNC will promote--who just happened to fall into wealth, power, and privilege.
I'm sure that everyone knows that he married into enormous wealth twice (Thorne Family = $200-400M on Wall Street; Heinz Family = $500-600M in consumer goods). Sure, we've read that campaign finance laws and a pre-nup preclude him from dipping into the Heinz fortune and that we'd be fools to think that Julia Thorne will give him any money. Buuuut, there are loop-holes and work-arounds for everything. For example, Heinz said that she'd use the fortune ONLY if the Repubs starting slinging mud and attacking her husband in the media. (Get ready to write those ketchup-colored checks early, T-Mama...) And, as for the Thorne riches, well, John Kerry is very close to his two daughters from the first marriage, and those two aren't fond of Teresa's intrusion into their post-divorce happy li'l father-daughter relationships. Speculating a tad here, the daughters are both over 21 and--surprise!--would be willing and able, I'm sure, to tap into the Thorne fortune to help dad's run for the White House, but, more assuredly, to try to one-up Teresa in the attention-getting department (meeeow!). Campaign finance reform be damned! John Forbes Kerry has a lot of money (he mortgaged his $6M house for the campaign..big deal!), and the elite rich have always had ways of getting around everything (see Bush, George Walker).
"So what?" I'm sure you're asking, or maybe you're thinking "You must be jealous or paranoid or worse...a communist!" Hardly. I just like to announce that the emperor wears no clothes. The populace is hoodwinked by Kerry because he's a Democrat, the candidate that helps the working class, the middle class, single mothers, inner-city children, over-worked farmers, and so on. Running as a Democrat doesn't make all that "help" become reality though. The American public, as it stares into the blue flicker of CNN or Nightline or Fox News, must remember ALL these Kerry biographical tidbits as they watch him hop around the country, with his shirt-sleeves rolled up, relentlessly bleating Primary rhetoric (go to the left/right in the primary; come back to the center at the convention) and getting in touch with regular folks west of Beacon Hill or south of the Russell Building. I hope that people take the time to see beyond JohnKerry.com or Kerry's Senate website or The Washington Post or that declawed Tim Russert (Et tu, Brute?) because, if they do, they'll see, once again, that the duopoly serves up two candidates with just different sides of rhetoric.
So what does all this mean to me? Well, for Bush to lose, which is what I want, there must be support for the Democratic nominee. If Kerry is the nominee, then, I want to hear all sides of his story, the good, the bad, and the ugly, before I'll punch the card for him in Cook County. I'm not going to vote for this guy just because he's a potential Bush-Killer. My choice takes into consideration more than one issue and MUCH more than the corporate media or partisan sheep-herding offer up.
posted by Brian at 9:42 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home