AJ DiCintio

John Morphing into Johnny
July 8, 2008

He’s harbored the dream of being president for quite a long time. He’s been through this presidential business once before. He’s been blessed with decades of access to the nation’s best, brightest, most accomplished minds. He sewed up his nomination months before his rival. Yet, to this point in the campaign, the man who hopes to loom extra large in the public consciousness has steadily diminished from John McCain to a Johnny evocative of a candidate in the last presidential election.

The stock response for this diminution is to blame it on managers who haven’t brought focus to John’s campaign, or, in the words of the WSJ, haven’t taught him how to deliver his message “crisply.”

The problem is, that explanation doesn’t say anything good about John, whose extensive experience should have taught him plenty about being crisp in delivering his message as well as being smart about selecting the kind of pilots, co-pilots, and bombardiers he wants aboard the Straight Talk Express.

What it does say, unfortunately, is that John probably suffers from a disease that afflicts 99% of politicians, a disease affecting the frontal cortex of the brain so that it tunes out any idea that in any manner conflicts with the policies the politician favors, a disease professionals might call “frontal cortex induced tunnel vision,” a disease, however, best known by its colloquial name, “drinking the Kool-Aid.”

Fortunately, John doesn’t suffer the affliction with respect to Iraq, having from the beginning been up-front with the American people regarding the stupidity of “limited war” and what’s at stake in Iraq. Indeed, his opponent is now squirming to change his policy to one that is realistic, without appearing to flip and flop in a manner that sends his anti-war base running — perhaps all the way to Ralph Nader.

But the rest of John’s diagnosis isn’t quite so good. Yet there is the thing called hope that Alexander Pope told us “springs eternal.”

With respect to John and his Kool-Aid problem, there is no better place to begin than with the number one issue on the public’s mind; for with regard to the economy, he dogmatically adopts the neo-con line that “free” trade is always good and fair trade.

How convenient, because drinking that Kool-Aid flavor permits him to sum up the entire complexity of the trade issue by telling workers that lost jobs are never coming back.

There is hope, however, that with respect to trade John might do something truly unconventional and name his running mate right now, and not just anybody but an eloquent, experienced person such as Mitt Romney, who knows a thing or two thousand about trade and jobs.

But John mustn’t simply name; he must send the nominee storming across the nation, especially to rust belt swing states, to give Americans some “crisp” straight talk about their and their children’s economic futures — yes, including how America can fulfill Romney’s promise to “fight for every job” and, yes, a daily repeated challenge that Obama explain to voters exactly what he’s going to do about NAFTA other than form a “NAFTA Study Commission.”

Now, to the border/immigration problem. Because he has drunk a whole pitcher of Kool-aid on this issue, John is unable to speak honestly about how it encompasses problems related to national defense, national integrity, wages, jobs, crime, tax burdens, drugs, and the Columbia-style terror poisoning both sides of the Mexican border.

But what might happen if John were to apologize for failing to demonstrate leadership regarding those problems, to apologize for his insulting simplification of a complex issue by saying merely that illegal aliens are doing work Americans won’t do, to apologize for proposing his “comprehensive” solution without first speaking with the American people?

A truck load of good things might happen if a straight talking John would apologize and then embrace a sound, common sense conservative position on the immigration/border question, not the least of which is that he could challenge Barack to get straight with the American people regarding whether the “everyone” in his health insurance proposal includes illegal aliens.

Then, there’s the problem of how the damaged Republican frontal cortex has traditionally responded to the problem of the Supreme Court by arguing there is nothing to be done about it, so, “talk little, do even less.”

(That cortex damage, by the way, is major league in nature, explaining why two of the four Liberal activists on the Court were nominated by Republican presidents and approved with “aye” votes from almost all Republican Senators as were Radic-Lib Ginsburg and her activist buddy Breyer.)

How easy, however, it would be for John to demonstrate that his frontal cortex is working just fine by

1) showing some fire in the belly as he discusses specific decisions with the public — the recent 5-4 case upholding gun rights (he can’t repeat “5-4” enough) and the 5-4 decision that the death penalty for the rapist of a child is unconstitutional immediately come to mind

2) showing some fire in the belly as he points out that his expedient talk notwithstanding, Barack Obama is clearly on record as favoring the appointment of Liberal Activists who would overturn the first decision mentioned above and uphold the second

3) showing some fire in the belly as he delivers a line such as the following at every place his Express stops:

The kind of judges Barack Obama will nominate consider the people of the fifty states to be ignorant slobs unworthy of being entrusted to decide issues such as the appropriateness of the death penalty for rapists of children, gun rights, and the “rights” of that class of people they call victims but the rest of us call violent criminals.

The suggestions made above don’t pretend to be complete in offering a cure for John’s “Johnny problem.” But they constitute some good, common sense, conservative medicine that will not merely get Johnny back to being his old self, it will begin transforming that old self into the best candidate John has ever been.