Posted on 07/07/2004 7:06:06 AM PDT by kattracks
Sens. John Kerry and John Edwards don’t make for a diverse presidential ticket. Both are filthy-rich middle-aged white males – words of horror to the liberal establishment, though offset by their left-wing voting records. Both have flip-flopped on many issues, the latest of which is their opinions of each other.
Edwards repeatedly said he would not be Kerry's running mate, though it has been obvious for months he was running for the No. 2 job. Will he be honest in the future, or did his denials in fact expose his character, or lack thereof?
Kerry, meanwhile, sniped at Edwards even more often than the one-term senator attacked him. Beltway insiders say the party establishment pressured a reluctant Kerry to accept his telegenic former foe.
Though the two are all smiles now, they were snapping at each other earlier this year. Among the conflicts pointed out by the Republican National Committee and the Associated Press:
Diaper Rash vs. Baggy Eyes
Kerry has frequently ridiculed Edwards’ lack of experience. In return, the freshman senator has portrayed the Massachusetts Democrat as an old fogy.
- “‘In the Senate four years – and that is the full extent of public life – no international experience, no military experience. You can imagine what the advertising is going to be next year,” Kerry told the New York Times in January. “When I came back from Vietnam in 1969 I don’t know if John Edwards was out of diapers then. Well, I’m sure he was out of diapers.”
- “Kerry took aim at Edwards’s lack of military and foreign policy experience while responding to Edwards’s comment that both candidates shared similar plans to rebuild Iraq,” the Boston Globe reported Feb. 23. Kerry said: “Well, I think he would like it to be that way, but I think I have 35 years of experience in international security, foreign policy and military affairs, and I think that makes an enormous difference here.”
- Kerry mocked the first-term pol’s lust for power. “The veteran senator also questioned the former trial lawyer’s pursuit of the presidency after less than one term in elective office,” the Globe reported Jun 10. “‘And people call me ambitious?’ a Globe reporter once overheard Kerry asking an aide.”
- “I think the American people want an experienced hand at the helm of state,” the Los Angeles Times quoted Kerry as saying on Feb. 3. “This is not the time for on-the-job training in the White House on national security issues.”
Not to be outdone, Edwards portrayed his rival being as old and tired as … well, as old and tired as Kerry looks and is.
- Edwards’ campaign, incessantly described by the media establishment as positive and upbeat, ordered underlings to describe Howard Dean as an “elitist from Park Avenue in New York City” and charge that Kerry “can’t claim to change America because he has been part of the failed Washington politics for too long,” CNN reported Jan. 22.
- A classic quote from Edwards in late February: “Do you believe that change is more likely to be brought about by someone who has spent 20 years in Washington or by someone who is more of an outsider to this process?”
You’re a Loser/You’re a Bigger Loser
Just months ago both candidates agreed on one thing: The other guy couldn’t defeat President Bush.
- “Edwards says he’s the only one who can win states in the South. He can’t win his own state,” Kerry told his aide David Wade, in a remark picked up by a reporter’s microphone, the New York Times reported Feb. 3.
- Steve Elmendorf, Kerry’s deputy campaign manager, said in mid-February, “We play everywhere, unlike John Edwards and Howard Dean and anyone else in the race.”
Edwards, on the other hand, branded Kerry as an out-of-touch Taxachusetts left-wing elitist.
- Edwards’ infamous memo unearthed by CNN on Jan. 22 advised, “In order to Bush, we need a nominee who can win Southern states, not another New Englander or Washington insider who loses every Southern state.”
- “The question is, who on the top of the Democratic ticket can go every place in America and campaign with the candidates and strengthen their ability to get elected? In Georgia, do you want John Edwards campaigning with you? Do you want Howard Dean campaigning with you? Do you want John Kerry campaigning with you?” the Times on Jan. 22 quoted Edwards as saying.
- A week later Edwards increased his assault. “If Democratic voters want to take the risk that we can for the first time in our country’s history win a presidential election without winning any Southern states then they have that choice; that’s not me. I’m somebody that will compete every single place in America, and with a proven record of doing that.” (In reality, his record proved to be losing every state except the Carolinas.)
- Edwards in early February: “Folks in the South, they’re tired of Republicans taking the South for granted. They’re tired of Democrats ignoring the South. What they want is somebody to fight for them.”
- The Times on Feb. 27 reported: “At one point, Mr. Edwards expressed doubt that Mr. Kerry could defeat Mr. Bush in a series of swing states that could decide the election next fall because of some of the votes he has cast over the years.” It quoted him as saying, “I would concede that Senator Kerry may have an advantage in New Hampshire. I would not believe he has an advantage over me any place else. I think I have the advantage in these other places.”
- Edwards took a rare gamble in depicting Kerry as a soft-on-terrorism leftist. After Kerry said there was “an enormous question about the exaggeration by this administration” on its evidence against Saddam Hussein, Edwards said in late January, “It’s hard for me to see how you can say there’s an exaggeration when thousands of people lost their lives on September the 11th
Trading Insults
Sen. Flip-Flop has been trying to have it both ways on Bill Clinton’s North American Free Trade Agreement, which he voted for in 1993 but now complains about, although not as much as his fresh-faced rival.
- Edwards “wasn’t in the Senate back then,” Kerry said in February. “I don’t know where he registered his vote, but it wasn’t in the Senate.”
- Kerry’s campaign mocked Edwards’ attempt to go populist on trade. An e-mail from a Kerry spokesman trashed a speech the North Carolinian gave, NBC noted Feb. 20: “Below is John Edwards MAJOR economic address, where he promises to reward work and to create opportunity. There’s one thing missing from this speech: TRADE. Apparently, cracking down on unfair trade practices and promoting fair and balanced trade was not a priority to John Edwards just eight months ago. Mr. Johnny Come Lately on Trade!”
- Another memo from Kerry’s campaign, accusing Edwards of flip-flopping four times on fast-track trade authority for the president, said Edwards “voted FOR the China trade deal, even while acknowledging that he thought jobs would be lost,” the Globe reported Feb. 20.
- Kerry’s handler Stephanie Cutter said in late February, “Edwards has talked more about NAFTA in the last three weeks than he did in his entire career.”
- Kerry joined in the attacks. “If he’s going to blame me for NAFTA, then I hope he’s going to give me credit for the single-vote passage of a deficit-reduction act that created 23 million jobs.”
- And then he stepped up the onslaught. “John Edwards has been in the Senate for five years. He’s talked more in the last five weeks about trade than he has in the entire five years. The fact is that he didn’t vote in the 1994 election when he had a chance to vote about trade. He didn’t talk about it, against it, in his election in 1998 when he ran for the Senate. And he went to the New York Times last week and said that he thought that NAFTA, in fact, was good for the prosperity of our country.”
Edwards, wooing Big Labor, had the luxury of not having to vote on NAFTA.
- He told CNN’s Larry King on Feb. 3: “I myself have been against NAFTA because of the damage it’s doing to our economy, against the other trade agreements that I don’t believe incorporate fair trade elements that need to be there. That’s the difference between Senator Kerry and myself. And I think these differences will become clearer and clearer as the race focuses on the two of us.”
- Echo chamber: The next day the Los Angeles Times reported that Edwards “cited his modest background and his opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement as two of their principal differences.” The candidate said, “I think these differences will become clearer and clearer as the race focuses on the two of us.”
- A week later, to the Globe: “I opposed NAFTA. I take trade and issues of job loss personally. I’ve seen it up close.” He called these “obvious differences” between himself and the front-runner.
- To NBC: “Senator Kerry voted for NAFTA; I opposed NAFTA. I wanted to make sure voters knew about that.”
- He emphasized to voters in Milwaukee: “I’m against NAFTA; I was against NAFTA. Governor Dean and Senator Kerry were for it.”
- To the Washington Post: “I think it’s clear that Senator Kerry and I have very different records on trade.”
- Edwards bragged to a college audience “that his disagreements with Kerry extended well beyond NAFTA and include many trade agreements he has opposed,” the Associated Press reported Feb. 20. The candidate said: “Those trade deals were wrong. They cost us too many jobs and lowered our standards.”
- To ABC’s “This Week” on Feb. 22: “We both voted for China; that’s correct. But Senator Kerry voted for all those trade agreements. And I did oppose NAFTA when I was running for the Senate, back in 1998, because I saw the devastation that it created. We have very different records when it comes to trade. And my position on this is driven by my own personal experience. I have seen the effect it’s had on families and on communities.”
- Edwards noted Kerry’s flip-flops on trade. “There is a difference here. There is a difference between Senator Kerry and myself. … What he’s saying now is different than what he did in the past,” the Post on Feb. 27 quoted him as saying.
He’s Not Greedy Enough/He’s Too Greedy
Kerry blasted Edwards for being the less greedy of the two in scheming to confiscate Americans’ paychecks. Edwards let Kerry have his way on that one.
- “Also, John Edwards, I notice, voted to give life to George Bush’s tax cut, because he voted for the first round of that tax cut. I did not. I always thought it was a pig in the poke,” the Massachusetts pol said Feb. 22 on ABC’s “This Week.” Clintonista host George Stephanopoulos observed, “He voted against the final package.” Kerry grumbled, “He voted against the final passage, but he gave it life by sending it to the Republican House.”
- Kerry targeted Edwards, CNN reported Jan. 14, by “promising to close the ‘outrageous tax loophole that allows wealthy business owners to avoid paying their Medicare taxes.”
Edwards, on the other hand, sounded like a Republican in tarring Kerry as a tax-and-spend liberal.
- “Senator Kerry has consistently said that he can pay for all the things that he’s proposing and substantially reduce the deficit, I think I’ve heard him say cut it in half, in his first term. Well, The Washington Post … just analyzed his proposals, and it’s the same old thing. Here we go again. In fact, in fact, he overspends, in terms of being able to pay for all of his proposals, he overspends by $165 billion in his first term, which means he would drive us deeper and deeper into deficit. My point is very simple about all this. This is the same old Washington talk that people have been listening to for decades. They want something different,” Edwards said during the Democrat debate Feb. 29.
- He told CNN’s Larry King on Feb. 17 that “the electorate is divided into a third Democrats, a third independents, a third Republicans. If we’re going to win the general election, we’re going to have to get independents. This is another in a long series of examples of me being much more attractive to independent voters. … I will make distinctions between Senator Kerry and myself. I’ve already been doing that, Larry, over the last several days here in Wisconsin.”
Not So Special
Kerry portrayed the fat-cat trial lawyer as a tool of not-so-special interest groups. Edwards portrayed the Beltway insider as a tool of not-so-special interest groups.
- Kerry’s mouthpiece Cutter said in late January, ‘If his intent is to remove special interests from Washington, why has he, as a member of the Judiciary Committee, taken more than $11 million from lawyers and law firms?”
- The next month she fought back after Edwards touted a study showing Kerry was the Senate’s emperor of special-interest money. “This is an interesting line of attack from the positive campaign of John Edwards considering that his campaign is wholly funded by trial lawyers, which are widely recognized as special interests and lobbyists.”
- In another shot at trial lawyers, whose endless lawsuits help make health care unaffordable for many Americans but who are one of the Democrat party’s biggest cash cows, Kerry sniped: “It seems to me there’s a huge amount of money that’s been compiled in his campaign from one particular area of our economy. People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.”
Edwards returned the fire.
- “It’s one thing to talk about special interests. It’s something else to do something about it,” he said in late January. “It’s a difference between Senator Kerry and me.”
- The Times reported Jan. 27: “Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, hoping for another lift here after his second-place finish in Iowa, said that unlike Mr. Kerry he had never taken contributions from ‘Washington lobbyists’ and told reporters traveling on his bus, ‘If we want real change in America, real change in Washington, it’s my belief that it takes somebody that’s not a Washington insider to do that.’
- Edwards said a week later: “We want someone who hasn’t been there for 15 to 20 years, if you’re going to bring change. I don’t take contributions from lobbyists. He obviously does.”
You Rich White Guy/You Richer Whiter Guy
The two fat cats bared their claws over which one could empathize with the common man.
- The two WASPs stung each other over Kerry’s blue blood. “If where you come from was a qualification for being president, we’d never have had Franklin Roosevelt or John Kennedy,” Kerry said in February. Edwards shot back: “I have lived with the same problems when I was growing up that most families live with every day. Because of that, I understand their problems on a personal level.”
- In one of his meanest remarks, Edwards accused Kerry of that ultimate Democrat sin: not pandering to the poor and unsuccessful. Where’s compassionate liberalism when you need it? “There are multiple differences on economics,” Newsweek on March 1 quoted Edwards as saying. “One, the difference in our personal stories. Two, I’m the person who’s focused much more on what has to be done for the middle class. Three, I have not heard him talk about poverty. I doubt if it would be a priority.”
- Edwards in mid-January: “In 1969, I was sitting around a kitchen table with my parents trying to figure out how we would pay for college like so many Iowans do every single day. And that is a difference between me and Senator Kerry.”
Raining on Mr. Sunny/Grinning at Mr. Rainy
Time after time, the dour Kerry displayed jealousy of Edwards’ sunny aura. Edwards, born to be a sidekick, usually kept his vacant Carter-like grin plastered on.
- Kerry’s campaign complained in late February: “Edwards promised to run a positive campaign. But now Edwards attacks John Kerry and runs from his own record.”
- The Bostonian complained in October: “Most importantly, I do something John Edwards doesn’t do, which is make health care available to every single American family. It doesn’t do a lot of good to just have kids covered and, as often is the case, not have the parents covered, because the kids wind up still not getting to the doctor.”
- During the Democrat debate Feb. 26, Kerry accused his future running mate of dishonesty. He complained “there’s nothing, nothing in the returns in 18 out of 20 primaries and caucuses so far that documents what John Edwards has just said. I won independents and Republicans in Iowa.” Moderator Larry King said, “You mean he’s not telling the truth?” Kerry replied, “There’s nothing that documents what he just said.”
- During the debate at USC in late February, Kerry hectored Edwards for refusing to say whether he regretted his vote for military action in Iraq. Kerry snarled: “You [were] asked a yes-or-no question: Do you regret your vote?”
Kerry, of course, voted for that same resolution, though as he infamously bragged to veterans, he later voted not to supply the troops he had put in harm’s way. But then, that sort of wishy-washy behavior is what makes Kerry and Edwards two flip-flopping peas in a pod.
Vapid and vapider.
In fairness, candidates of the same party do tend to trash each other during the primaries. It should be avoided because the other party can then exploit the intra-party bombs later on.
I recall that Bush 41 coined the term 'voodoo economics' when he was running against Ronald Reagan for the GOP nomination in early 1980.
The thing is, all of the invectives these two hurled at each other are true.
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