The Soufflé Candidacy

All day long I’ve been trying to find a particular Dilbert cartoon. It’s an older one but if I remember correctly, Dilbert is introduced to a new boss with impeccable credentials: he has an MBA from “Harfurd” University and (as the pointy-haired boss notes) “we think his hair will turn executive white!”

Such is the thin reed of a résumé that the Democrats are depending to propel John Kerry into the White House. It’s an astonishing march of lemmings each making the cry of “electability” before taking the plunge. Robert Moran in the National Review details why Kerry has the aura of “electability”:

He fought in Vietnam and is occasionally hugged by veterans.
He looks like a president.
He is a Democrat.
He is more "electable" than Howard Dean.
He is angry with George W. Bush.

And his hair is a Presidential salt-and-pepper. But, whatever you do, don’t walk heavily around Kerry’s record since Vietnam. There’s almost no legislation bearing Kerry’s name and his votes in the Senate reveal that he’s a proxy for Ted Kennedy. For all his blather about “fighting” for Americans, Kerry has done precious little in the Senate to support his self-inflated image.

Campaigns are about differences. The differences will be stark and polarizing, and these differences are more likely to pull Kerry's undefined vote support down than they are to impact President Bush. After all, the voters know who the President is, but they know very little about Kerry.

They know, um, that he’s tall. After that, the deluge.