In The Telegraph:
"The Kerry campaign is a bore that's degenerating into a laughing stock. 'Bush-despising' is no doubt very comforting to McCrum's beleaguered literati but in the end it's little more than snobbery - fine for cocktail condescension but utterly inadequate for an election campaign. You can't beat something with nothing, and Kerry is about as spectacular a nothing as you could devise - a thin-skinned whiny vanity candidate who persists in deluding himself that Bush's advantage is all down to 'smears' and 'lies' and 'mean' 'attacks'. It's not. Bush's something is very simple: his view of the war on terror resonates with a majority of the American people; when he talks about 9/11 and the aftermath, they recognise themselves in his words; they trust his strategy on this issue. For an inarticulate man, he communicates a lot more effectively than Senator Nuancy Boy.
"Wallace Shawn, by contrast, is a writer, a man who makes his living by words and yet devalues his own currency. Is the Bush-Cheney tyranny truly a 'scary' time for him? Is he really 'scared'? Of course not. He's having a convivial drink with a fawning Brit interviewer; what could be more agreeable? 'Scary' is - to pluck at random - being held hostage in a school gym and the kid next to you is parched and asks for water and the terrorist stabs him in the belly in front of your eyes. 'Scary' cannot encompass both that situation and Wallace Shawn's vague distaste for Bush without losing all meaning."
