Check out the way Adam Nagourney covered this thing (this is the paragraph excerpted in the Hotline):
New York Times' Nagourney: "More than reinforcing his own credentials as a wartime president, Mr. Kerry used this speech on Thursday -- to what was certainly the largest audience the four-term senator from Massachusetts has ever faced -- to offer a blistering critique of Mr. Bush's 42 months in office, going so far as to echo one of the signature attacks Mr. Bush used against Bill Clinton when he ran in 2000 by challenging Mr. Bush's honesty. ... And the gauzy introductions leading up to his arrival -- folksy and personal tributes from his two daughters, a Hollywood biographic video, war stories from one of his buddies from Vietnam -- signaled another goal of his convention: to provide a softer view of a politician whose own friends describe him as cool and distant" (7/30).
Here's my problems with what he wrote:
1) Nagourney characterizes the speech as primarily a blistering critique of Bush. It was not. It was so much more than that. It was about leadership, about values, about striving to be better than the past. Of course, characterizing it as mainly Bush-bashing is the most effective way to blunt the impact of the strategic trap Kerry laid when he challenged to joinn him takingthe high road.
2) referring to the bio as a "Hollywood" bio is an uneccesary qualifying word. Describing things as Hollywood is a pejoritive used by Republicans as code for "untrustworthy, out of the mainstream, elitist". His insertion of that right-wing code word betrays his bias and reveals his desire to discredit the unfiltered information people might have seen.
3) Once again Nagourney has to remind us that some think Kerry is cool and distant. Never mind that the repeated testimony of those who know him, and Kerry's very own speech, disproved that. It's like Nagourney couldn't wait to say, 'don't believe what those who know about him said about him at the convention. I know the truth, and the truth is the guy is not what they said he is."
Shame on Adam Nogourney.