Untitled Document

29 July 2004

B-Game

I was talking to a freind and just saw the closed caption under his boyish beaming visage. Accordingly, I was able to judge the words and not the rhetoric while matching it to his facial movements.

It was a pretty wild ride through the evening. There is no question that Al Sharpton brought his "A-game" to the podium. He apparently had an approved text and then, in the great tradition of the pulpit, felt the Spirit move within him, and let it move him into an impassioned diatribe against the Administration.

Man, he can talk! He felt the Bush Administration had disrespected the African-American Community when it had the temerity to suggest that it was being lead down the primrose path by people like the Reverend himself.

And he launched in an impassioned response that called back the image of Bull Conner and firehoses and the high drama of the struggle for the vote. I think the Kerry handlers were a bit taken aback, since Sharpton strayed from the orchestrated message, off the reservation and out of the box, and went for the Republican throat. But I enjoyed it. Al knows theater, and he was the only major candidate who had a chance to say what many people actually think.

The larger theme of this evening was to buttress Kerry's credentials as a man of strength with the gravitas to serve as a wartime Commander-in-Chief. The beach-landing of Kerry and his thirteen Swift Boat comrades earlier in the day, landing from Logan airport like taking the Boston Beaches, was the scene-setter, carefully orchestrated.

But of course, everything is. I forget sometimes that it is an artificial reality.

The appearance of General Merrill McPeak, former chief of Staff of the Air Force and John Shalihashvilli, former two-time Chairman of the Joint Chiefs was the highlight for me. Forgive me that, but I spent a long time in their worlds and they fascinate me.

Lt Gen Claudia Kennedy introduced Shali. She was the first woman to make three-stars in the Army. She was an intel type, and retired as Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence- DCSINT, as the acronym goes. It was pronounced, when current, as "des-int," with the accent on the second syllable.

I was dispatched to talk to her years ago, when she had put her first star on. She was at Forces Command, the Army formation then entrusted with the land defense of the United States. I was supposed to sweet-talk her about some activity we paid for from Washington, and found her to be courteous if a little thin on the substance.

But that is patronizing, and she certainly went further than I did. Inter-service rivalry being what it is, there was a race between the Army and Navy on which Service would be the first to promote a female to three-star grade.

navy won, promoting Pat Tracy to be Chief of Naval Training a few weeks before Claudia was selected to be DCSINT. Of the two, I naturally preferred Navy version. I think she had a reputation for competence. Claudia retired after successfully torpedoing a fellow general officer for a clumsy grope in her Pentagon office. The offending general had been nominated to be the Army Inspector General, and he was forced to retire as a two-star after her campaign, which may have been the biggest accomplishment of her time in the job.

Another odd duck did color commentary. Merrill McPeak was a holy terror when he ran the Air Force. The incumbent Chief had been fired by then SecDef Dick Cheney for running his mouth about the wartime capabilities of the Aero-space force, and Merrill, an intense cerebral fighter pilot, came into the job unexpectedly.

Or maybe cerebral is an oxymoron when speaking about fighter pilots. But he certainly shook things up. He changed the uniform from a blue-colored version of the Army tunic to a strange business-suit arraignment with Navy-style strips on the sleeves. Everyone was a little embarrassed, particularly when he forced a change to the white T-shirt worn under the uniform shirt.

Merrill mandated the V-neck version of the undershirt, so it would not show when worn under the open-neck Class-B uniform.

Word at the time was that the decision was made so the chest-hair on manly men could be seen. The whole uniform thing quietly died after Merrill retired, but he broke a lot of other institutions in the Air Force while he ran the show, and the legacy is still being paid for by the active duty guys.

Shali was magnificent on the podium. He is a stocky little guy, pugnacious and tough. He was more impressive when he was festooned with the badges and medals of his office. He was a competent and effective Chairman. Not a visionary like Colin Powell, perhaps, but he was one of a kind.

Shali had been the center of a minor firestorm when he was appointed. The Clinton folks did not know a great deal about the military, and it seemed like Shali's background as the immigrant son of a Georgian-Polish officer gave him great credibility. I am talking about the Georgia that is in Russia, of course. Shali was born on 27 June 1936, in Warsaw, Poland.

What the Clinton folks had forgotten was that everyone from the East came with some baggage. Shali's Dad had been an anti-Communist for sure.

He joined the German-sponsored Georgian Legion in 1943, serving with other Georgian expatriates as a regional unit of the Waffen SS. Young Shali attended school in wartime Berlin while their father fought in Normandy and Italy against U.S. forces. His father was fortunate enough to be arrested in 1945 by British forces, and the family emigrated to the United States in 1946. Shali enlisted in 1958.

So there is all that, and now Shali says he is proud to declare he is a Democrat. I wonder what might be in store for him in exchange for this declaration in the Kerry Administration? And Claudia and Merrill?

The campaign has the convention bounce at the moment, but I see people nodding in some of the offices, saying that they might just pull it off.

The address by John Edwards was the culmination of the night. There was a minor war in the PBS press box. Edward's daughter introduced his wife, who in turn introduced the beaming Senator. I thought he looked tired. The two long-term commentators, Mark Shields and David Brooks, watched along with me and gave an honest take on the speech when it was over.

Despite the dazzling smile, I thought there was something missing in the address. Maybe he is still suffering from the cold that laid him out last week. It could be as simple as that. But his "two America" approach left me a bit cold. something that Barak Odama's stirring keynote address did not.

Some white guy said after it was over that only a white Southerner could speak about the issue of race with any credibility. I had to fill in the "for a white to speak of race," since obviously Al Sharpton had been as authentic as the day is long just an hour earlier. Hearing the wealthy trial lawyer rail against injustice, running mate to the billionaire, always makes me a little uneasy. But I do not question John's sincerity.

David Brooks is the old unreconstructed liberal. He glanced down at the large yellow legal pad before him and said he was a little disappointed. His jowls are large and his eyes are enormous behind his thick rimmed glasses. Mark Shields is the smiling neo-con bookend to Brooks, and they agreed that it was a B-game performance.

PBS has hired some historians to give context to the event. They are well spoken and uniformly left-of-center, as best I can determine. They hastily begged to differ, saying that it was a moving and effective speech. Michael Beschloss, Richard Norton Smith and Ellen Fitzpatrick all agreed it was a wonderful and significant moment.

David Brooks Squirmed a bit, realized he had actually said what he thought. He corrected himself and said even a B-game performance by Edwards was a marvelous thing, and he had just been too close to the campaign, and was a bit jaded.

Sheilds agreed with him, and backed off a little. By the time the morning headlines rolled around the record had been corrected, John Edwards was powerful and brilliant and the historical record was correct and on-message.

After the speech the delegates were polled and the official tally of votes for Senator Kerry was conducted. No one covered it, not even PBS. I gave up and went to bed. But I will be back to watch again tonight. I don't want to miss a single word.