Kathleen Parker exposes Hillary and Dean's chief weakness: lack of self-awareness

I must admit that until I returned to South Florida, I had only rarely read Orlando Sentinel columnist Kathleen Parker, usually when I was traveling somewhere and found her in a local newspaper that carried the work of the Washington Post Writers Group's members.
More recently, though, I've become familair with her p.o.v. thru the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, even though I have her as one of my "Google Alerts" so I don't miss one of her columns or someone elsewhere in the country writing about her.
I agree with her two most recent columns 100%, which believe me, is rare praise from me.
She didn't mention, though, in case it matters to you, that the author she mentions, Kenneth Pollack, is Ted Koppell's son-in-law.
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http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/opinion/columnists/orl-parker0207may02,0,6989782,print.column

May 2, 2007
Kathleen Parker
Hillary Clinton's 27 words

ORANGEBURG, S.C. -- Of all the words spilled during the recent Democratic presidential debate, the most interesting were 27 of Hillary Clinton's in response to a question about the candidates' biggest mistakes.

Clinton began self-effacingly, saying that her mistakes were too numerous to list, but offered a couple: that whole health care thing. "And, you know, believing the president when he said he would go to the United Nations and put inspectors into Iraq to determine whether they had WMD."

Say what? While we're pulling deflections out of the memory hole, what about believing the international community that Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons?

Or, to bring it closer to home, what about believing her husband, who told Larry King on July 22, 2003, that "it is incontestable that on the day I left office, there were unaccounted for stocks of biological and chemical weapons"?

What Hillary Clinton was trying to say, it seems, was anything to avoid suggesting that she had made a mistake in voting for the 2002 joint resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq.

Admitting error regarding Iraq has become the litmus test for Democratic candidates. Among the top tier, John Edwards has repeatedly declared his vote a mistake. Barack Obama, though not yet in Congress at the time of the vote, was always opposed to the war and says he predicted what has come to pass. Clinton had admirably resisted joining the mea culpa chorus, but finally succumbed. If she had known then what she knows now, she began saying relatively recently, she wouldn't have voted the way she did.

Quick show of hands: How many would have supported invading Iraq had they known there were no WMD? Doubtless, not many, even though overthrowing Saddam Hussein had been a standing U.S. policy since the late 1990s.

Kenneth Pollack, author of The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq, said in a 2004 interview that he shared the Bush administration's belief that "it would eventually be necessary to go to war to prevent Saddam Hussein from acquiring nuclear weapons."

Pollack, who was an Iran-Iraq military analyst for the CIA, differed with the Bush administration about when and how to tackle Iraq. Though highly critical of pre- and post-war planning, he, too, believed that Saddam was a threat.

"I can't think of anyone who did not believe that the Iraqis had a weapons of mass destruction program," he said. "There was simply no one."

Even Saddam believed he had a biological, chemical and, possibly, nuclear program in place. As David Kay told The New York Times following his post-invasion survey of suspected arms caches, Iraq was still researching and developing ricin production and weaponization up to the end. Otherwise, according to Kay, Saddam's scientists lied to the Iraqi leader about weapons programs in order to get government funds.

Among those who argued compellingly in favor of the war resolution was the now-contrite Edwards. On Sept. 12, 2002, he told the Senate that the time had come for decisive action against Saddam -- to do "whatever is necessary to guard against the threat posed by an Iraq armed with weapons of mass destruction, and under the thumb of Saddam Hussein."

Edwards may feel that the war has gone badly -- who doesn't? -- but his vote was consistent with thinking at the time that prevention was necessary to survival. The invasion was clearly aimed at guarding against the unthinkable in the context of fresh and horrific wounds.

Saying that one's vote -- exercised in good conscience based on convincing information --- was a mistake is meaningless rhetoric in the service of politics. Clinton seemed to understand that and her resistance to the cheap grace of public confession was refreshing while it lasted.

Her biggest mistake, alas, was not in believing that Bush would place U.N. inspectors in Iraq, which was never part of the war resolution. Bush did say, perhaps disingenuously, that he hoped force wouldn't be necessary -- and many wished that inspectors, who were in Iraq, had had more time.

But Saddam was persistently in violation of U.N. resolutions. Believing Bush seemed a better bet than believing Saddam.

The clear intent of the resolution, meanwhile, was to authorize war, if necessary. That's what Clinton voted for. Her mistake is trying to pretend it was something else, and hoping no one will notice.
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http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/opinion/columnists/orl-parker2907apr29,0,6143446.column

April 29, 2007
Kathleen Parker
Dean's world in a sound bite

One can understand why Howard Dean feels that the world would be better off without the press, as he suggested recently to a group of bankers.
Dean, the Democratic National Committee chairman, was responding to a banker's complaint that candidates speak only in sound bites.His solution: "Have candidates in to meetings like this and bar the press."Now there's a concept from a man who should know.Few have benefited less from media exposure than Dean, who will be forever remembered as "The Scream" for his war whoop during his 2004 presidential election bid.
Then again, Dean of all people should also know that citizen journalists are everywhere, even at banking conventions, and that nearly everybody has a video phone and access to YouTube."
Barring the press," alas, would require human extinction. Another concept for another day. Meanwhile, we know what Dean meant. And, doubtless, many Americans reflexively agree. The media are not beloved by many -- at least not until the many consider the alternative. Saddam Hussein didn't like the media either.
But Dean has a point, which is that the omnipresent, omnivorous (not omniscient) media more often distort than reveal the truth. Driven by corporate profit motives, media conglomerates pander to the least noble of man's appetites and become "infotainment," as Dean put it.
We've all bemoaned the shallowness of news coverage that pays lip service to issues while plumbing the depths of paternity when an illegitimate child is born to a money-filching, drug-addicted stripper. Oh, sorry. I mean a widowed mother who worked her way up from small-town obscurity to prominence through the visual arts.
Thus, inadvertently, Dean was making a case for the written word. When we speak of media today, after all, we're really talking less about newspapers and magazines than of cameras and video screens. In a world where television, YouTube and the Internet dominate the media field, visual imagery necessarily dominates discourse.
If one were to play the word association game with top presidential candidates, saying the first word that a person's name inspires, that word most likely would be visual -- or possibly auditory. In either case, both are captured by film and tape, as opposed to words on the printed or virtual page.
Admit it: Say John Edwards, we think hair; Hillary Clinton, pantsuits; Barack Obama, so far, a smile; Mitt Romney, starched shirts and soap; John McCain, forever a POW; Rudy Giuliani, the man from Ground Zero.
These are superficial characterizations, but images matter. They register with the unconscious as symbols and evoke a visceral response precisely because they're processed by the brain's right hemisphere where our emotions hang out. Written language, on the other hand, is processed by our left hemisphere -- home to reason and logic.
Our right lobe feels; our left lobe thinks. It's no mystery why the Democratic Party, identified as the more-feeling party, is also home to more artists and actors, while the Republican Party tends to attract more business-minded folks.
This is an oversimplification of the workings of brains and politics, clearly. We're all a little bit this and little bit that, and the lobes, though one usually dominates, communicate with each other through 250 million or so nerve fibers. Some of us are even ambidextrous, though we try to keep it quiet.But the issue Dean raises about honesty vis-a-vis media in the political realm underscores the danger of relying too much on what the camera delivers versus what the mind deduces from reasoning through the written word. What we see is not all of what we get.We don't want to live by words alone, obviously. Emotions aren't frivolous, but they are another form of information. Visceral responses, otherwise known as "gut feelings" or intuition, are often reliable, if primitive, ways of knowing.
Yet when it comes to understanding issues, television becomes the enemy of thought and YouTube is inherently unfair by the deliberate exclusion of context.
Of course, thinking is harder than feeling, which may explain why reading has fallen in disfavor and candidates scramble to post their own flicks on YouTube. But Americans who want to make informed choices would do well to spend more time reading than watching.The "boob tube" got its nickname fair and square.