10/27/2004|||109887168065166665||||||

HOW NOT TO WIN FRIENDS AND INFLUENCE PEOPLE

Especially if you're an intern....Three cheers for David Bradley Kenner, one of the very few Slate contributors to speak up for Bush in the magazine's in-house poll.

I'm devastated to see that Christopher Hitchens is now backing Kerry. (Unless he's being super-ironic, of course.)

It's safe to assume that Jacob Weisberg's endorsement won't be appearing in the JFK campaign ads:

I remain totally unimpressed by John Kerry. Outside of his opposition to the death penalty, I've never seen him demonstrate any real political courage. His baby steps in the direction of reform liberalism during the 1990s were all followed by hasty retreats. His Senate vote against the 1991 Gulf War demonstrates an instinctive aversion to the use of American force, even when it's clearly justified. Kerry's major policy proposals in this campaign range from implausible to ill-conceived. He has no real idea what to do differently in Iraq. His health-care plan costs too much to be practical and conflicts with his commitment to reducing the deficit. At a personal level, he strikes me as the kind of windbag that can only emerge when a naturally pompous and self-regarding person marinates for two decades inside the U.S. Senate. If elected, Kerry would probably be a mediocre, unloved president on the order of Jimmy Carter. And I won't have a second's regret about voting for him. Kerry's failings are minuscule when weighed against the massive damage to America's standing in the world, our economic future, and our civic institutions that would likely result from a second Bush term.

|||Clive|||http://clivedavis.blogspot.com/2004/10/how-not-to-win-friends-and-influence.html|||10/27/2004 10:56:00 am|||||||||

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