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| Saturday, January 31, 2004 |
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| Kerry's Flip-Flops: Let the Countdown Begin |
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Johnny, we hardly know ye. Sadly, that won't last.
Now that Kerry is the clear leader, stories of his epic capacity for playing both sides are beginning to make the rounds. Last week Jeff St. Clair of Counterpunch sent around this Rich Lowry (National Review) blog note on Kerry's Patriot Act pronouncements:
Today's Kerry excoriates Attorney General John Ashcroft for violating American civil liberties with his evil tool, the Patriot Act. "We are a nation of laws and liberties, not of a knock in the night," Kerry huffs. "So it is time to end the era of John Ashcroft. That starts with replacing the Patriot Act with a new law that protects our people and our liberties at the same time." Maybe Kerry should have thought about that before voting for the Patriot Act in 2001 — since laws and liberties are pretty important and all.
Back before he had to worry about competing with one Howard Brush Dean, Kerry was positively delighted by the Patriot Act. "It reflects," he said on the Senate floor, "an enormous amount of hard work by the members of the Senate Banking Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee. I congratulate them and thank them for that work." While supportive of "sunset" provisions in the bill, Kerry pronounced himself "pleased at the compromise we have reached on the anti-terrorism legislation." These are not the words of a man about to help inaugurate an era of brown-shirt law enforcement.
And Sam Smith's excellent Progressive Review (link at right) highlights this nugget from James Taranto of Opinion Journal:
Former Democratic front-runner Howard Dean recently criticized current Democratic front-runner John Kerry for taking the wrong positions (by Dean's lights) on both the liberation of Kuwait, which Kerry opposed, and the liberation of Iraq, which he supported. As we all know, Kerry has tried to have it both ways on Iraq, voting "yes" on the October 2002 resolution authorizing war, then proclaiming himself shocked that President Bush actually waged the war Congress authorized.
It turns out Kerry was no less two-faced about Kuwait 13 years ago. The New Republic's blogger Noam Scheiber credits TNR intern Josh Benson with digging up an item that appeared in the magazine's March 25, 1991, issue, quoting a pair of letters Kerry wrote to constituent Wallace Carter of Newton Centre, Mass.:
Jan. 22, 1991: "Thank you for contacting me to express your opposition . . . to the early use of military force by the US against Iraq. I share your concerns. On January 11, I voted in favor of a resolution that would have insisted that economic sanctions be given more time to work and against a resolution giving the president the immediate authority to go to war."
Jan. 31, 1991: "Thank you very much for contacting me to express your support for the actions of President Bush in response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. From the outset of the invasion, I have strongly and nequivocally supported President Bush's response to the crisis and the policy goals he has established with our military deployment in the Persian Gulf."
How many such anecdotes has Karl Rove's team already amassed? |
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# -- Posted 1/31/04; 12:21:41 PM
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| Thursday, January 29, 2004 |
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| Dean: Trippi Out, Neel In |
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Hardly surprising, hardly encouraging--though Trippi has not exactly done wonders for Dean of late. According to today's NYT account, it was Trippi who encouraged Dean to shake the rafters in his Iowa concession speech.
Roy Neel is an old telecom lobbyist and party hack. Maybe they could raise money by issuing a Howard Dean phone card that runs out of minutes after you've called too many people in Iowa and New Hampshire.
Back tomorrow or over the weekend. |
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# -- Posted 1/29/04; 10:53:42 AM
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| Wednesday, January 28, 2004 |
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| Kerry: Everything's Coming Up (Paper) Roses |
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And that's John F. Kerry to you, bub
Everybody loves a clown. From the, uh,
incomparable www.ramisalami.com
Before we go sifting through the New Hampshire results, let's pause for a second to commemorate the absurd and purposeful bit of voodoo that is the modern primary system. In the past week and a half, John Kerry has gone from also-ran to frontrunner on the strength of wins in two states that are neither consequential to the larger election nor representative of the country as a whole. Both are remarkably white, rural, and culturally conservative--by which I mean, warier than most of change in all its guises. And after those two states come a series of primary days dominated by southern states that are considerably more conservative on the whole. There is real institutional genius in the design of the primary season; it helps mightily in culling out insurgents and left-libs, as it was intended to do.
On the other hand, I don't mean to say that "the system" got Howard Dean in any simple sense--it certainly stacked the deck against him (and that goes for the media as well as the Democratic party apparatus), but Dean also played into its hands. Last night's post-New Hampshire speeches offered a fair glimpse of how Kerry has managed to advance and Dean to decline. Kerry, speaking first, delivered a well-wrought address touching every theme that Dean popularized; Dean, in contrast, was received like a rock star by his supporters and spent the first 10 minutes or so shouting--sorry, invoking--slogans in parallel construction. The tone was more subdued than his post-Iowa rally, but he was no less the off-key, uninspiring cheerleader. Finally, after he had made most of his audience tune out, Dean turned to a more reasonable facsimile of the stump speech that made him popular in the first place. But barring a miracle, it was--and is--too late.
This is a huge win for Kerry, as much for the way the rest of the field broke as for his own point total. To put it another way, Kerry didn't just win; everybody else lost. No one is going to buy a resurgent Dean at this point. When all the spin's been spun, he still blew a 20-plus point lead in the state where his campaign first caught fire. John Edwards made relatively paltry gains on the basis of his strong Iowa showing, winding up a nose behind Wesley Clark, who skipped Iowa to engineer a strong showing in New Hampshire. (As of this morning, with 98 percent of precincts and over 200,000 ballots counted, Clark led Edwards by fewer than 700 votes.) [CNN results page.]
Consequently, there is no number two in the race at the moment. (And Kerry's fundraising is starting to reflect that: reportedly he raked in a million on the net this past week.) Edwards and Clark will tussle head-on for that designation starting next Tuesday, but if Kerry takes next week's big prize, Missouri--and with Gephardt's endorsement, it shouldn't be very close--and performs respectably elsewhere, the two Southerners may be running for vice-president at this point. That race is presumably Edwards's to lose, since Clark's military credentials would be redundant on a ticket headed by Kerry.
I'll be writing more about the question of Kerry's "electability" later, but meantime here's a sampling of BW reader responses to my query on the subject yesterday. (I'm interested in hearing more, also from Kerry enthusiasts.)
In closing, I wonder if you've noticed the increased frequency with which media are referring to Kerry as John F. Kerry, no doubt nudged on by Kerry's people. Privately, Kerry has always felt that his middle initial would be an ace in the hole someday. Here is Brian Willson, a very bitter former Kerry supporter and fellow Vietnam vet, on an encounter he had with JFK v2 shortly after Kerry's 1984 election to the Senate:
In the wee hours of the morning, you made two comments that troubled me: (1) you stressed [that] your initials, JFK... would help you one day in your quest for the White House, and (2) that after War Department briefings (and perhaps CIA as well) about the need for funding and training contra terrorists in Afghanistan and Nicaragua, you had a new appreciation for their importance in furthering U.S. policies. [Read Willson's essay.]
So here's today's question: What does the F stand for, anyway? Use your imagination; Kerry admirers welcome to play as well.
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# -- Posted 1/28/04; 8:28:39 AM
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| Tuesday, January 27, 2004 |
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| Back Tomorrow |
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Plus a question for readers
As regular visitors have already noticed, I'm not posting every day since Mark Gisleson's departure, and I probably won't be until the campaign gets going this summer. (Or--the perpetual caveat--unless something blows up, literally or otherwise, between now and then.) I'll be putting up items two or three times a week on average, occasionally more.
Tomorrow I'll be posting on the results from New Hampshire, which I fear may include the Dean campaign's obituary. (Monday's Zogby tracking poll had Kerry up by 3; today's has him up 13. I'll bet that's not far wrong.)
Meantime, a question: Am I the only one who has doubts about Kerry's stature and staying power as a candidate? Write and let me know. |
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# -- Posted 1/27/04; 7:35:49 AM
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