John Kerry

IN YOUR GUTS, you know he's a putz.

Okay, so that tepid swipe at John Kerry doesn't pack the same wallop of the more venomous, and incorrect, slogan used against Barry Goldwater 40 years ago, but at least it's more honest than what the triple-agent Clinton veterans are hurling at the current occupant of the White House.

Like Joe Lockhart, the quintessential D.C. lying hack who was inexplicably hired by the Kerry campaign (along with the more capable, and also ex-Clinton press secretary Mike McCurry) in the last month. Lockhart, who'll likely step to the guillotine on orders of Kerry's chief strategist of the week for his murky involvement in Dan Rather's 60 Minutes agitprop-gone-haywire, let loose with a whopper last Thursday after Interim Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad Allawi appeared before Congress. Kerry was bad enough in criticizing the visiting dignitary's remarks, especially since he didn't even attend Allawi's appearance and hasn't touched Mideast soil recently, claiming that the volatile country is in far worse shape than any Iraqi official will admit.

Lockhart, who must not have read the briefing that Kerry supposedly places immense value on the friendship of allies around the world, told the Los Angeles Times, "The last thing you want to be seen as is a puppet of the United States, and you can almost see the hand underneath the shirt today moving the lips." How strange. Listening to Democratic rhetoric, you wouldn't think George W. Bush, who after all has the i.q. of an exceptionally silly foie gras-producing goose, had the cunning to trick Allawi that way.

Dick Cheney takes a lot of heat from his superiors in the media-even though he's absolutely on target in saying the United States would be more vulnerable if Kerry's elected, God save the Union!-but he doesn't give a hoot. Unlike John-John Edwards, the unctuous Democratic vice presidential candidate who's in a rabbit hole now, trying to salvage his (2008) political career, Cheney knows his job in a campaign: kick a dog when it's down. His response to Kerry's slap at Allawi was typically succinct and brutal: "I must say I was appalled at the complete lack of respect Senator Kerry showed for this man of courage, when he rushed to hold a press conference and attack the Prime Minister, a man America must stand beside to defeat the terrorists."

Golly, I suppose the above isn't in the spirit of this "Best of Manhattan" issue. Last year, when I wrote a downbeat column-probably about the fraud called Paul Krugman-for New York Press' largest edition, my friend (and editor) Jeff Koyen later chastised me for being too churlish. Oh, brother. Like Koyen doesn't have the word NEGATIVITY etched across his forehead.

But I'm a sport.

For example, the best column this weekly has published in 2004 was by Matt Taibbi on Sept. 8. Mind you, Matt and I have almost zero in common politically-although we're both Bosox fans-but his essay after the GOP convention at the Garden was easily the most intellectually honest point of view from a left-wing writer. If Kerry (and Taibbi's not exactly a fan, taking, I imagine, the lesser of two evils approach) had any sense he'd hire relatively young people like Matt who aren't tethered to the Beltway ladder to success.

Taibbi, who calls Bush an "idiot president," was nonetheless disgusted by the narcissism of the party-hearty protestors who showed up in Manhattan for the Republican coronation. Not only is the author hilarious-"Hey, you assholes: The 60s are over! I'm not talking about your white-guy fros, mutton-chops and beads. I'm not talking about your Che t-shirts or that wan, concerned, young-Joanie-Baez look on the faces of half your women"-but the tactics he outlines to defeat Bush ought to scare Karl Rove back to some Texan shot 'n' Pearl saloon.

He's talking specifically about a wasted opportunity at the convention, but Taibbi's idea ought to be embraced by a Kerry operative other than the clueless Robert Shrum, Teddy Kennedy or Lockhart (has he been fired yet?). Here's the plan, one that could be utilized in every swing state at every appearance by Bush or Cheney.

Taibbi: "That's why the one thing that would have really shaken Middle America last week wasn't 'creativity.' It was something else: uniforms. Three hundred thousand people banging bongos and dressed like extras in an Oliver Stone movie scares no one in America. But 300,000 people in slacks and white button-down shirts, marching mute and angry in the direction of Your Town, would have instantly necessitated a new cabinet-level domestic security agency. Why? Because 300,000 [or 50,000 or 25,000, say at smaller event in Milwaukee, Minneapolis or St. Louis in the next month] people who are capable of showing the unity and discipline to dress alike are also capable of doing more than just march? The people who run this country [and here Matt goes into an anarchist shtick] are not afraid of much when it comes to the population, but there are a few things that do worry them. They are afraid we will stop working, afraid we will stop buying, and afraid we will break things. Interruption of commerce and any rattling of the cage of profit-that is where the system is vulnerable. That means boycotts and strikes at the very least, and these things require vision, discipline and organization."

I disagree that violence, physical or commercial, would help defeat Bush-the backlash would kill Kerry's campaign more than Lockhart and Stephanie Cutter's ham-handed fibs, not to mention the senator's outrageous scare tactic of saying that Bush will reinstate the draft-but Taibbi's most salient point is that if the president's opponents actually seemed committed, were willing to temporarily chuck their nose- and genital-rings for the sake of a larger purpose, most of the country would notice. And so would the media.

Which brings me around to the New York Times' Clyde Haberman, a normally inoffensive columnist who writes mostly about the city. Haberman's Sept. 24 essay, centered around the fabulously original idea [lifted from Tina Brown?] that journalists are egocentric men and women who write and speak to each other rather than consumers, contains one paragraph that you'd think, post-Howell Raines, would've been excised at the paper's copy desk, if one still exists.

On the topic of the rapid disintegration of Rather's attempted hit-job on Bush and his National Guard experience, Haberman is compelled to explain what blogs are. I don't think, even though almost every other newspaper in the country has abandoned similar talking-down to readers, that he's joshing.

He writes: "For the uninitiated, blog is short for Web log, a site on the Internet where one can become an instant publisher, filling the ether with musings and facts. They are similar to, yet different from, those of us who do much the same thing for newspapers but lack a modern cachet. 'Newspaper' is so Gutenberg. Perhaps we should take a cue from the blogs, and join the 21st century by calling ourselves spapers."

Translated: These proles, who undoubtedly didn't attend journalism school, are mucking up my job, and those of my colleagues, and, frankly, it kind of sucks.

Lots of laughs, but not quite as funny when Kerry, trying to look like a regular guy when he visited a town in Pennsylvania earlier this month and got tangled up in his inability to speak clearly. As reported by the Times' David Halbfinger: "'Everybody told me, 'God, if you're coming to Canonsburg, you've got to find time to go to Toy's, and he'll take care of you,' Mr. Kerry said, dropping the name of a restaurant his motorcade had passed on the way in. 'I understand it's my kind of place, because you don't have to-you know, when they give you the menu. I'm always struggling: Ah, what do you want? He just gives you what he's got, right?' Mr. Kerry added, continuing steadily off a gangplank of his own making: 'And when you don't have to worry, it's whatever he's cooked up that day. And I think that's the way it ought to work, for confused people like me who can't make up our minds.'"

Give Kerry credit for admitting he's "confused," which is one of the more colossal understatements of this campaign. And one hopes that during the debates, when the senator's asked about why his sister Diana is insulting Australian Prime Minister John Howard, a key ally in the war against terrorism, by saying that Howard's endangered his fellow citizens by joining forces with Bush, Kerry will become just as tongue-tied.

I don't know if Bush is "incurious" [the preferred euphemism by Democratic journalists who believe the President is stupid] or not, but he certainly wouldn't have fumbled a lunch order in a town outside of Pittsburgh. Bush would've simply said to the proprietor, or cook, "What's good today? Great, I'll have it."

Back to my "Up With People" mode. I greatly enjoyed faux-historian and professional friend of John F. Kennedy Jr. Douglas Brinkley's admission, as told to the Times' Jodi Wilgoren (the woman who trashed Howard Dean's wife last year), that "Every American now knows that there's something really screwy about George Bush and the National Guard, and they know that John Kerry was not the war hero we thought he was." Tie me kangaroo down, sport! This is the guy who wrote the hagiography of Kerry, Tour of Duty, just last year. Watch out, Doug, Joe Lockhart's going to lash you 42 times with one of Janis Joplin's ball and chain antiques. o