Word: periphera
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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FLYING TO MINNESOTA ON AIR FORCE ONE LAST WEEK, WHITE House press secretary Scott McClellan held a "gaggle"--that is, a mini--press conference--with reporters in the back of the plane. The first questions were about Hurricane Ivan and the Dan Rather flap, the compelling news periphera of the moment. Then I asked McClellan about the intelligence community's dire assessment, sent to the President in a July National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), that we seem to be losing the war in Iraq...
...would read anything that appeared on his TelePrompTer? Did Kerry not remember what he had said to Stephanopoulos? No, it was, apparently, yet another Kerry nanonuance: he is in favor of redeployments, just not now. The second question is far more dire: Why is Kerry wasting breath on such periphera? Why isn't he hammering Bush on his conduct of the Iraq war and the larger war against Islamist radicalism, which is the most important issue in this election...
...confront the threat of terrorism the way he has, to drastically cut taxes, to create an expensive new Medicare prescription-drug entitlement. But it is also possible that a public besotted with the sensational will be unable to engage in a substantive argument--and instead be deflected into periphera like the quality of Bush's Vietnam-era service, the controversy surrounding Kerry's antiwar protests and the need for a constitutional amendment prohibiting gay marriage. In 2004 the quality of the debate may be the election's most important question: Are we going to be serious about this...
There are futility metaphors aplenty here: The contrast between the swaggering President and the squabbling Dems. The nonargument over periphera. The absence of an audience. But then, the Democrats have excelled at futility for more than 30 years. They have elected two Presidents during that time, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. Both were Governors of Southern states. Neither was a well-known party leader. Neither ran on what many Democrats would consider a traditional--that is, liberal--agenda. Carter was the first born-again Christian President; Clinton once owned a pickup truck with AstroTurf carpeting in the back. Carter...
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