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Contributors
Thomas Lifson - Contributor
Thomas
Lifson is a management consultant in Berkeley, California,
specializing in US-Japanese management issues. A self-styled
recovering academic, he graduated from Kenyon College
with a degree in political science, and received a
masters degree in East Asian studies from Harvard,
an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School, where he was
a Baker Scholar, and a doctorate in sociology from
Harvard. He subsequently taught all three fields on
the faculty at Harvard, and also taught economics at
Columbia University’s Graduate School of International
Affairs. He is a partner in the award-winning winery
Sunset Cellars, in Alameda, California. Mr. Lifson
is proprietor of the website American
Thinker. [go to Lifson index]
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 The
Stress Test
An imperious first family?...
[Thomas Lifson] 10/21/04
Suddenly,
it doesn’t seem like much fun being a billionaire
couple in the national spotlight, with a focus of intensity that
only a presidential campaign can provide. Queen Teresa and her
prince consort John had always enjoyed being the center of attention,
eagerly seeking opportunities to express their well-informed
views to the lesser orders of mortals. Kerry was so eager to
appear on local news broadcasts in Massachusetts that he earned
the nickname “Live Shot” for his practice of charging
over to reporters addressing mini-cams and offering comments
for the evening news. Teresa, for her part, found that the audiences
she addressed at Heinz Foundation-funded symposia on The Great
Issues of the Day treated her every word as the concentrated
essence of wisdom.
The run for
the White House was supposed to be a piece of cake. Bush, after
all,
was an idiot, barely able to generate an intelligible
sentence, and the Democrats’ friends in the media were
promising to add 15 points of voter support, in the now-notorious
words of Evan Thomas, one of the top editors of Newsweek. With
American soldiers fighting and dying, admirably sophisticated
foreign friends heaping scorn on America, and the economy dropping
salaried jobs in favor of entrepreneurial self-employment, the
voters should be readily persuadable that disaster was at hand.
Surely, they would dump W and restore a JFK to the White House.
But it hasn’t
been working. The national polls show a close race, with Bush
stubbornly in the lead most of the time
in most polls. The proprietary unpublicized polls of both campaigns
are telling the candidates to battle over the states that Gore
won last time, as demonstrated by the deployment of campaigners
and advertising dollars. The prospect of Teresa adding the White
House to her string of palatial residences seems to be dimming.
You can almost see the wheels turning in their minds: how can
this be happening to me? What the hell is the matter with the
American public? The French, the Germans, even the Canadians,
all hate Bush. These damn swing state voters are dumber than
even we thought.
Next to the
prospect of hanging, nothing else focuses the mind like the
possibility
of power, perks and position slipping from
the grasp of those who have lusted after them for decades. So,
it is time to speak bluntly, and let the slower members
of the voting public realize what a huge mistake they will
be making
if they support this…this…stumbling, bumbling…Texan!
This is why we are being treated to the spectacle of the candidate
slyly informing the ignorant heartland homophobes out there that
the Cheney family harbors a lesbian in its bossom. They are so
stupid and bigoted that they will recoil in horror. After we
keep them from voting for Bush, Teresa can spend her White House
years making good on a pledge to make gay tolerance a centerpiece
of her First Lady duties so there will no harm done, really.
A necessary step that our friends in gay community will understand.
For her part, the prospective first African American inhabitant
of the White House is having a hard time dealing with the popularity
of her rival, Laura Bush. The polls show that the public overwhelmingly
likes her. Yet she speaks with a drawl, and has never even demonstrated
a facility in French. She feeds her husband cheeseburgers, for
crying out loud, and regards a backyard barbecue as a satisfactory
dinner party.
Possibly
with the onset of Fall weather, Teresa’s arthritis
has been acting up again, causing her to take extra doses of
the gin-soaked white raisins she
recommends as a cure. So she “forgot” that
Laura Bush worked as both a teacher and a librarian, and possesses
a masters degree, when she said of her rival:
I don't
know that she's ever had a real job — I mean,
since she's been grown up.
Teachers
and librarians being highly-organized interest groups supporting
the Kerry
campaign, Teresa apologized to members of
these professions within the same news cycle her comments appeared.
However, full-time wives and mothers are still, stupidly, regarded
as not having “real” jobs.
Given the
status of women voters as the crucial swing constituency, what
can explain
the stubborn contempt inherent in Teresa’s
posture?
The answer is disarmingly obvious. Teresa grew up in colonial
Mozambique, where cheap black domestic labor made full time motherhood
a matter of giving orders to and correcting the behavior of the
servants, and then idling away the afternoon on the veranda while
drinking pink gin fizzes, or whatever it was that Portuguese
colonials consumed in their tropical overlordship.
When she
became a mother herself, Teresa had one of America’s
great fortunes available to afford a similar army of better-paid
servants in Pittsburgh and Washington, DC. Motherhood and wifehood
once again were a matter of giving orders. American wives
actually have the advantage of servants who speak the language
better
and are more familiar with the customs of the master’s
household, for goodness sake. The duties of motherhood under
these circumstances are not to be confused with a real job.
So the Heinz-Kerry team finds itself enduring the stress of
a potential looming disaster. It is no longer fun. Off-balance
and under pressure, they are letting their core beliefs and habitual
attitudes show. And it is not a pretty picture. CRO
copyright
2004 Thomas Lifson
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