BY DAN
KENNEDY
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Monday, July 12, 2004
STAHL'D OUT. I hope I don't
see a worse interview all year than the one Lesley Stahl conducted on
60 Minutes last night with John Kerry and John Edwards. Mrs.
Media Log was covering her eyes in embarrassment as Stahl alternated
between oozing unctuously and taking the viewers for
fools.
The worst moment came when Stahl
tried to play gotcha with Kerry on his vote in favor of the war in
Iraq. She started by running that clip of Kerry saying that before he
voted against the $87 billion in reconstruction money he voted for
it. That was obviously not one of Kerry's finer moments, and she was
right to bring it up.
But then she tried to use that as a
way of demonstrating that Kerry can't give a straight answer on
whether he regrets his vote in the fall of 2002 authorizing the
president to go to war. Her news peg was last week's Senate
Intelligence Committee report.
Among other things, she noted that the Democratic vice-chairman, Jay
Rockefeller, now says he would have voted against the war if he knew
then what he knows now. Why, Stahl demanded of Kerry, can't
you just admit you made a mistake?
The transcript isn't available yet,
but CBS
News's synopsis matches my
recollection:
Is Kerry for or against
the war in Iraq? "I think the president made a mistake in the way
he took us to war," says Kerry. "I am against the war - the way
the president went to war was wrong."
The Senate Intelligence
Committee has just issued a report saying that the basis for the
war was erroneous, and that there weren't weapons of mass
destruction. Given what he knows now about that report, would
Kerry have made the same decision?
"What I voted for was an
authority for the president to go to war as a last resort if
Saddam Hussein did not disarm and we needed to go to war," says
Kerry. "I think the way he went to war was a mistake."
"I know you want to make this
black and white, but the difference is - if John Kerry were
president of the United States, we would never be in this place,"
adds Edwards. "He would never have done what George Bush did. He
would have done the hard work to build the alliances and the
support system."
"Why build an alliance if they
didn't have weapons of mass destruction," asks Stahl.
"We would have found out, that's
the point," says Edwards.
Regardless, Kerry says he
doesn't regret his vote: "I believe, based on the information we
have, it was the correct vote."
Edwards has said that if he is
elected "no young Americans will go to war needlessly."
"That's true," says Edwards. "He
[President Bush] didn't do the things that should have
been done before taking this country to war. This is not a -; I mean, we've now said it 10 times, this is not a
complicated thing."
Gee whiz, why can't Kerry give a
yes-or-no answer? It's no wonder that Edwards got irritated with
Stahl's disingenuous questions - and Edwards is not someone who gets
easily irritated, at least not in public.
Stahl would have known better if
she had read the
Boston Globe's Kerry bio.
Here's what Kerry said before his vote giving Bush the power
to wage war:
The vote that I will give
to the president is for one reason and one reason only, to disarm
Iraq of weapons of mass destruction if we cannot accomplish
that objective through new, tough weapons inspections in joint
conference with our allies. I expect him [Bush] to fulfill
the commitments he has made to the American people in recent days
- to work with the United Nations Security Council ... and to "act
with our allies at our side" if we have to disarm Saddam
Hussein by force. [p. 346]
In other words, Kerry's position on
the war today is precisely the same as it was in the months leading
up to it. He has been absolutely consistent. As Edwards said, it's
not a matter of "black and white." To the extent that Kerry later turned against the war, it was because Bush didn't wait for the inspections to play out, didn't consult with our allies so much as dictate to them, and didn't act with the explicit authority of the Security Council.
Is this really so difficult?
Apparently it is if you're Lesley Stahl.
posted at 11:22 AM |
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MEDIA LOG ARCHIVES
Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
