The Covenant of the Arc

Andrew Sullivan recently called this election "the irresolute vs. the incompetent". Make that the story arc, and who would you vote for?

Which is exactly why the debates will be important. I can only remember one distinct moment from the 2000 campaign -- and it wasn't even really a moment on the campaign: Al Gore's "Lockbox" and Bush's "Strategery" on SNL. Bush beat Gore in the debates. Maybe not hands down, but effectively enough in the minds of the voters, and at least enough to take a couple of knife-edge states. Gore just reinforced who he was in the minds of the voters: Mr. Lockbox. The Conventional Wisdom that Gore was the King of Bores was not dispelled by his performance against Bush, and that was enough to tip the election. The question is, can Kerry pull the ultimate flip-flop and turn the Conventional Wisdom -- and the story arc -- around? And can he seem genuine doing it? The difficulty in doing so is evident in my reinterpretation of a Kos analysis today. I think Kerry would have had a case that he did not flip flop on Iraq if he had stuck to the line of argument delineated on the quoted Al Franken blog. Problem is, the CW is entrenched, thanks in large part to crazy negative advertising by the RNC and co. It's going to be tough to persuade the voting public to accept even a justified (non) flip. And frankly, Kerry's getting what was coming to him all along. If Iraq had gone well, he would have claimed he had supported it all along, just look at my voting record, thank you very much. But now that it's gone badly and the base is fervently dovish, Kerry's stance is too garbled to be a winner.