The Conservative Cat

The weird stuff starts immediately.

It was a little after 7 p.m. on election night 2004. The network exit polls showed John Kerry leading George Bush in both Florida and Ohio by three points. Kerry's aides were confident that the Democratic candidate would carry these key swings states; Bush had not broken 48 percent in Kerry's recent tracking polls. The aides were a little hesitant to interrupt Kerry as he was fielding satellite TV interviews in a last get-out-the-vote push. Still, the 7 o'clock exit polls were considered to be reasonably reliable. Time to tell the candidate the good news.

Right out of the box we see that we're dealing with a made-for-TV movie script rather than a news story. While the paragraph contains some verifiable facts, these are quickly lost amid the desire to relate the emotional states of Kerry's nameless "aides". Precisely because the aides are nameless, the emotional states are neither verifiable or deniable, an important indicator that we're dealing with a quasi-fictional treatment.

The author is not, however, done pulling your heart-strings. Brace yourself for a heavy dose of irony.

Kerry had slept only two hours the night before. He was sitting in a small hotel room at the Westin Copley (in a small irony of history, next door to the hotel where his grandfather, a boom-and-bust businessman, shot himself some 80 years ago).

Here's another classic from later on in the article. Again, notice the time devoted to description of the setting and Kerry's emotional state.

On this damp November evening, [Kerry] appeared alone in the house; he answered the door and showed his visitor into a cozy, book-lined drawing room. His face was deeply lined, his eyes drooped, he looked like he hadn't slept in about two years. But his manner was resolute, his mood seemed calm, even chipper.

The author is just now sitting down to interview the subject of the article, and we're past the halfway point. If you're looking for the content of the interview, you're going to walk away disappointed. The author spends two more paragraphs reading between the lines of the candidate's comments (which are never quoted) and then closes with interviews of more nameless aides about Kerry's chances in 2008.

To be fair, this article is billed as excerpts from a book, so it is as much an infomerical for the book as it is a valentine to a defeated candidate. Nevertheless, unless the text selected for the article is different from the book as a whole, the full 45,000 words is going to be heavy on filler and light on fact.

Keep that in mind the next time you see a jumbo-sized book on how Reagan lost the Cold War. There's a lot of wiggle room between truth and non-fiction.

Respectfully submitted,

Ferdinand T. Cat