Home > Whole lotta flippin’ and a floppin’
Les Payne
The gathering of the Republicans in New York was as much a circus of the well-heeled as it was a big tent for the trapeze artists of the flip-flop.
The zigzag was set by the keynote speaker, a politician who, a dozen years ago, delivered the keynote address - for the Democrats. Zell Miller is as fond of the flip-flop as he is of his dirt roots in Georgia. He steadfastly promises to die a Democrat, a promise some hope would hasten after the GOP keynote.
The irony of the Miller choice is that the most effective image the Bush White House has floated against challenger John Kerry is that of a man who flip-flops. This charge, which has dogged Kerry on the campaign trail, echoed repeatedly throughout the four days of the convention. Showcasing Miller prime time, however, turned the zigzag charge on its ear.
In addition to supporting Bill Clinton at Madison Square Garden in 1992, Miller praised Kerry in 2001 as "an authentic hero." Other GOP speakers broke with profession and even family members.
Married into the nation’s most prominent Democrat family, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger flopped to the GOP side that his bread is buttered on. The waxen visage of Schwarzenegger, the bodybuilder flipped actor flipped politician, played well as a Kennedy-connected spouse under the hot lights. The Madison Square Garden home of pro athletes and the circus was just as exciting a venue for the trapeze acts of the GOP.
Reduced to its core, Schwarzenegger’s message was that a once scrawny immigrant from Austria had pump-ironed his way into the ranks of the wealthy. As his fortune grows under GOP mathematics, Schwarzenneger’s celebrity is the least he can offer to promote the party that plucked him out of the Hollywood Hills and, after engineering a successful recall, planted him in the Sacramento statehouse.
With Rudolph Giuliani, it was not so much the flip-flop as a reverting to form. The adulterous, thrice-married former mayor of New York led the GOP charge at the podium with all the brimstone of an ersatz moral force. What’s left of the hair he once raked over his forehead is severely brushed back over his ears on the lucrative talk circuit. As with the hair, Giuliani has flipped wives, and he flops about the country these days with the confidence of a millionaire shamelessly minted on the coinage of the disaster of the World Trade Center.
As a magnet speaking of himself as a present-tense mayor, Giuliani’s not altogether ineffective lecture flowed from the well of his previous career as a U.S. prosecutor. During summation, the lathered-up attorney ripped at John Kerry with the practiced fury of a Giuliani dicing a white-collar defendant. "John Kerry," he said, "has no clear, precise and consistent vision." Unlike Kerry, he continued, "President Bush (will) stick with difficult decisions even as public opinion shifts" and new information flows in.
This laughable charge that so amazingly has stuck to Kerry is all the more laughable for issuing from the same White House that, as a rule rather than the exception, flip-flops with the greatest of ease and regularity.
It is on the grave issue of war, peace and killing that the president flip-flops almost continuously. Shortly after 9/11, Bush declared his unstinting devotion to tracking down Osama bin Laden: "There’s an old poster out West, I recall that says, ’Wanted: Dead of Alive.’" Unable to collect the bounty of bin Laden, Bush said at a press conference in March 2002, "I don’t know where he is. You now, I just don’t spend that much time on him."
With his attention shifted to Saddam Hussein, Bush, in September, 2002, stated, "You can’t distinguish between al-Qaida and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror." A year later he changed his view to confirm that "we’ve had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved in Sept. 11."
Even as the GOP convention got under way last week, Bush flip-flopped publicly on a grave matter of national policy. When Matt Lauer asked Bush if the United States could win the war on terrorism that is so central to his campaign, the president replied: "I don’t think you can win it. But I think you can create conditions so that those who use terror as a tool are less acceptable in parts of the world."
This was not quite the stout-hearted image of the war president that Giuliani, Schwarzenegger and the rest were painting at Madison Square Garden over national TV. Within 24 hours, Bush issued a quite different statement on the war against terror: "Make no mistake about it, we are winning and we will win."
The GOP was silent on the Bush flip-flop.
Forum posts
7 September 2004, 00:32
This administration and their war are a colossal FLOP!