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The media may not have a handle on John Kerry just yet, but the Teresa Heinz Kerry storyline has been set in stone for months. This week’s issue of Newsweek goes where nearly everyone has gone before, asking, “Will she ultimately be seen as Teresa the loose cannon or Teresa the warm better half to a husband who can be chilly?” The glowing cover treatment suggests that it’s going to be the latter. And even if she doesn’t get to be the first lady, Newsweek suggests she may have a future in European-style art films: “She’s a sultry 65, in a distinctly Mediterranean way, pulling her long curls off her face and dropping the occasional French phrase in a soft, breathy voice.”
Sacre bleu!
The ubiquitous and talented Ryan Lizza shows up in the most recent issues of both The Atlantic and The New Republic, and he’s talking Shrum. Bob Shrum, that is — Kerry’s senior advisor is having his moment in the sun, and, should Kerry win, we expect a torrent of books suggesting that Shrum s the real brains behind the operation. (Memo to Karl Rove: Watch your back.) The TNR piece has the best quote, suggesting that the Kerry campaign’s decision to absorb Republican attacks early on worked only because of the torrent of bad news coming from Richard Clarke, Iraq, and the 9/11 Commission:
“Shrum was lucky, not good,” says one Democratic strategist, speaking of Kerry’s senior advisor. “I wouldn’t want to plan my presidential election strategy around the machinations of some wacko Iraqi cleric and the Simon and Schuster publication schedule, but those are the only things keeping this ‘don’t shoot until you see the whites of their eyes’ gambit plausible.”
For those of you keeping score, by the way, the Clinton autobiography is coming out in June.
US News & World Report asks the question: What were George and John up to in 1971? The answer is pretty much what you’d expect: Kerry was married, testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and pursuing a career in politics, while Bush was a fighter pilot in the Air National Guard and a “fun-loving party guy who bounced from job to job.” Kerry, who the authors equate with the John Lennon song “Imagine,” “enjoyed folk music and sang with [Peter] Yarrow [of Peter, Paul, and Mary] at parties and gatherings. Sometimes Kerry played guitar.” (That doesn’t make this any less embarrassing, however.) What about Bush, “the drifter?” “He held his own in a drinking game called Dead Bug. When someone shouted ‘dead bug!’ everyone had to drop to the floor, belly up, twitching their arms and legs.” The last man on the ground bought the next round.
Finally, another TNR writer moonlighting for The Atlantic, Jonathan Chait, is rethinking our political fixation on the bright side of life. “Optimism has also brought us many of history’s monsters,” he writes. “The Crusades, Mao’s ruinous Great Leap Forward, Napoleon’s disastrous invasion of Russia — these could have been prevented by a bit less optimism.”
The more optimistic candidate has won most recent presidential elections, Chait notes, but the formula isn’t foolproof — as evidenced by the defeat in the Democratic primaries of John “In Defense of Optimism” Edwards. And even the founding fathers had more in common with Hobbes than Locke, he concludes, “which is why they constructed an elaborate system to prevent not only traditional tyranny but popular tyranny as well.”
Hey — a cynic is just an idealist who has tasted disappointment.
–Brian Montopoli
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