The blogosphere continues to bubble with John on Jon reviews. Electablog’s David Pell speaks for some unnamed group of people announcing that “we will not vote against a guy because he’s not funny … but we will vote against someone who is trying to portray himself as something he’s not.” (See Matthew Yglesias on Cheese Whiz). “In other words,” Pell continues, “Kerry will be fine unless he’s trying to convince us that he’s funny. And certainly no one can accuse him of doing anything of the sort” on “The Daily Show.” At Dummocrats, jkhat is puzzling over Kerry’s “Would that it were” response to Jon Stewart’s question about whether Teresa Heinz Kerry gets a nickel “every time I use ketchup.” Whatever does this phrase mean, Jkhat wonders, protesting that “We certainly don’t say things like that in Midwest.”
Carrying on about Kerry, Glenn Reynolds declares that he is “pretty tired of blogging about [him] and the election,” and “if Kerry had more, um, definition I’d probably write about him a lot less.” Nonetheless, the intrepid Reynolds blogs on about Kerry and Cambodia and Christmas 1968, a matter of great concern to him which, he asserts, was first ignored by the press (“shamelessly covering for Kerry”), then spun by the press and now confused by the press. “Was the press more professional decades ago,” Reynolds muses, “or was it just harder to tell when they cheated?”
A Friend of Glenn’s over at Tech Central Station opines that “Big Media is going to be … stark raving, foot stomping, breath holding, going-to-bed-without-dessert mad” if Kerry is not elected. F.O.G. cites a rather dated New York Times “informal survey” of journalists which, he notes, showed that more of the 153 journalists polled favor John Kerry for president over George W. Bush. “If Bush wins,” F.O.G. concludes, “come November 3 we’re going to witness the Mother of All Hissy Fits.” (F.O.G. forgets to include the really interesting finding of that survey: the dirty little secret that these self-same journalists would rather cover a Bush administration than be saddled with four years of reporting on a Kerry White House.)
Bush’s return for four more years is still a big if, Atrios reminds readers with his link to what he calls “one craptacular approval rating” (an Economist/YouGov poll showing Bush’s approval rating at 39 percent). Atrios is miffed by “the reluctance of the media to seize on” what, to his mind, “is the clear narrative of the election right now — the incumbent Bush is in serious trouble.”
Speaking of trouble, KLo, of National Review‘s The Corner, seems troubled enough by her experience in New York City thus far that she has lapsed into — before next week’s Republican Convention even begins — what she admits is a “mixed metaphor animal cliche.” KLo has already concluded that “New Yorkers are not all that welcoming.” Her evidence? An innocuous-sounding conversation with someone she calls her “Snapple guy,” and the sight of a “native New Yorker” exiting a sports bar and issuing what KLo describes as a profanity-laced “leave us alone already cry to fellow bees — buzzing along in the rat race.” (We hate that, when bees buzz in the middle of a rat race.)
One can only imagine what will happen should KLo encounter one John Perry Barlow, who plans to “(very mildly) disrupt” the convention by approaching convention-goers and “danc[ing] at them.” He and his “Soldiers of the Dance Revolution” will “roam the sidewalks in Republican-rich zones, periodically erupting into wild and inexplicable explosions of dancing” before “melting back into the crowd.” The way Barlow figures it, most Republicans “don’t or won’t dance … and are unsettled by those who do.”
Being fans of that fabulous 1984 Kevin Bacon vehicle, “Footloose”, we already knew that.
–Liz Cox Barrett
Liz Cox Barrett is a writer at CJR.