BY DAN
KENNEDY
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Tuesday, November 11, 2003
Blaming Kerry. The
commentary over John Kerry's decision to fire campaign manager Jim
Jordan is all the same: it's Kerry's fault, it's the candidate not
the handler, his message is muddled, he's Gore II (a line
pushed especially hard by Jim VandeHei in this morning's
Washington Post), blah, blah, blah.
All this is true up to a point. But
consider, if you will, the possibility that Kerry's biggest problem
is that he cast a principled vote that he knew would be unpopular
with the liberal activists who control the Democratic primary
process.
I'm referring, of course, to his
decision last fall to side with the majority in authorizing George W.
Bush to go to war against Iraq. No, I wasn't happy with his vote, but
I understood it.
Everyone -- even Jacques Chirac and
Gerhard Schröder -- believed Saddam Hussein was harboring
weapons of mass destruction. Long-term UN inspections were the best
way to go, something that is even more obvious now than it was then.
But there was considerable merit to the argument that Saddam would
give the finger to the world if there weren't also a credible threat
of force coming from the US.
We didn't know then what we know
now: that Saddam's WMD capabilities were vastly overblown, aided and
abetted by Bush-administration lies over Nigerien yellowcake,
aluminum tubes, and the like. Kerry certainly doesn't want to
announce publicly that he was duped, given that almost the entire
rationale for his candidacy is his deep experience in foreign policy.
So he flounders and flops, trying desperately to explain his vote to
party activists who will never fully forgive him for having abandoned
his antiwar roots.
So perhaps the pundit who comes the
closest to explaining the dire state of Kerry's campaign this morning
is Boston Globe columnist Joan Vennochi, in a piece
headlined "Kerry's Irreversible Error."
Vennochi's view of Kerry's pro-Bush
vote last fall is entirely cynical, which I guess makes sense if you
believe that (1) Kerry thought he already had the Democratic
nomination sewed up and therefore (2) he was positioning himself to
peel moderate independents away from Bush in the general-election
campaign. That's a lot of presupposing.
But Vennochi gets it right when she
says:
Reversing the Kerry slide
is going to be difficult, because Kerry cannot reverse the single
biggest mistake he made as a presidential candidate: voting for
the Iraq war resolution. His vote represents the
get-tough-by-getting-to-the-middle brand of thinking that is big
in Democratic Leadership Council circles. That thinking, however,
is not popular with grass-roots Democratic activists in Iowa and
New Hampshire. It pushed them right into the arms of antiwar
candidate Howard Dean.
I don't know Kerry. I do know that
reporters who've covered him the longest don't seem to like him very
much. Yesterday ABC's "The Note" -- in a fictitious memo from Jim
Jordan to Kerry's new campaign manager, Mary Beth Cahill --
called
the Globe's reporting on Kerry "the most relentlessly negative
coverage of any presidential candidate EVER by a hometown paper."
(Click here
if "The Note" has been updated by the time you read this.)
That's a bit much, and the
"Note"-sters may have been trying to reflect Jordan's views rather
than make any sort of objective assessment. But there's no doubt
the Globe has been rough on Kerry at times.
In the midst of all this cynicism
and negativity, it would be interesting if it turned out Kerry's
downfall was the result of his being too principled rather than too
calculating.
The politics of Macs versus
PCs. One would have thought it unnecessary to revisit that
less-than-penetrating question at the Rock the Vote debate over which
computers the candidates prefer.
But reader A.S.B. points me to this
absolutely hilarious account of what really happened, written by the
hapless questioner in a letter
to the Brown Daily Herald.
The link was working last night,
but it appears to be overloaded this morning. Read it if you can. If
you can't, try this
link to the
NewsMax.com site. Essentially, the student was bullied into asking
the question, and was told that if she didn't, she wouldn't get her
15 seconds of media glory.
Hilarious but also outrageous.
Shame on CNN and Rock the Vote. The debate was stupid enough without
their witless attempts to dumb it down even more.
posted at 9:11 AM |
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Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
