"I botched the joke"
You botched your aspirations.
Posted on 11/01/2006 4:52:11 PM PST by Pokey78
The first time I met Senator John Forbes Kerry was shortly before 9/11, when I was sitting in the office of a Republican member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee talking to a young staffer about European defence.
Suddenly, the Massachusetts senator strode into the room and plonked himself, hands on hips, between us. Then he just stood there, clearly expecting us to jump up because he had graced us with his hallowed presence.
He turned his back on me and I studied his perfectly arranged thatch – this was a man who has spent some time on coiffing his hair that morning (or maybe he had someone to do it for him) – as he barked questions and demands at the astonished aide.
Many people in Washington have similar DYKWIA – Don't You Know Who I Am? – anecdotes about Kerry that reveal his narcissistic conceit that it is all about him, all the time. This trait is the key to the kerfuffle over Kerry's comment at a California rally that: "Education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq."
The words were clumsy and, yes, an insult to American troops. I have no doubt that he didn't mean to say that US soldiers in Iraq are dumb cannon fodder but that's what came out. He was trying to say that Bush was stupid (though the Texan's grade-point average at Yale was higher than that of Kerry) – a jibe that plays well in Europe but not in much of Middle America.
It would have been a minor blip in the final week of the campaign if he had apologised immediately and unequivocally and got the hell off the airwaves.
Instead, he wriggled and huffed and hit back and compounded his mistake with intemperate bad-mouthings of Republicans as "assorted Right-wing nut jobs" and "hacks who've never worn the uniform of our country are willing to lie about those who did". Having been, in his view, misrepresented by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in the 2004 presidential race and berated by his own party for not hitting back hard enough, Kerry went for the jugular. But his desire not to be "Swift Boated" (the attacks were so successful they coined a verb) and lack of political judgment meant that this time he overreacted.
To the delight of Republican strategists, as dawn broke across America yesterday, there he was on the Don Imus radio talk show quibbling about his "botched joke". This time, it wasn't so much what the meaning of "is is", as Bill Clinton famously ventured during the Lewinsky scandal as what the meaning of "us is". According to Kerry, "I left out the word 'us'. 'They got us stuck.' Instead of that, I said, 'They got stuck', and they're taking advantage of it." They are indeed taking advantage of it. With a week to go before the mid-term elections and Democrats poised to win the 15 seats they need to win back the House of Representatives – and perhaps even the six to bag the Senate – Republicans were praying for an "October surprise".
Kerry left it late, until Halloween, but the Grand Old Party was not about to look this gift horse in the mouth. On the 2000 campaign trail, Bush told me that politics was "like judo – you use your opponent's energy to your advantage". A gaffe by a politician only has real legs when it reinforces an existing perception. And so it has been in this case. Kerry has long had a reputation as a haughty Boston Brahmin, a privileged, elitist, condescending careerist who cannot relate to ordinary Americans.
In contrast, on the stump this week Bush has shown that whatever his faults – and there are many – that he still has that indispensable political gift of speaking simply to ordinary people rather than talking down to them.
Kerry served with some distinction in Vietnam. It is a question mark over the character of Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney that they chose to circumvent the draft rather than serve their country in combat. But Kerry's persistent attempts to capitalise on this have become unseemly.
US servicemen are revered in a way that the British squaddie can only dream of. Soldiers travel in uniform and are routinely ushered to the front of queues and given upgrades to business class with no questions asked. On an American Airlines jet from Dallas last Sunday, a flight attendant made a spontaneous announcement about "the sacrifice our young men and women are making to keep us safe". The whole plane applauded her.
This is not just rah-rah jingoism. The aching reality of war is also apparent. At Houston airport on Wednesday night I pulled up behind a white hearse with two soldiers in dress uniform inside it. "That's one of our boys coming home from Iraq," said a sombre Avis representative, waving me past.
As Kerry has found out, you try to exploit this sentiment for political gain at your peril. The military is the most integrated sector of American society. Poor youths with a bit of get up and go about them use it to get funding for college to pull themselves up a rung on the economic ladder.
I have sat in Humvees and Bradley fighting vehicles with black sergeants from Alabama, marines from Mexico and good ol' boy snipers from Kentucky in places like Fallujah and Ramadi as they described their hopes with an affecting optimism that belied the mortal danger they were in. In many ways, they embody what is great about America.
Yesterday, Democratic candidates from Montana to Iowa and Minnesota to Tennessee were cancelling campaign rallies with Kerry and demanding he apologise. Preposterously, the senator was claiming that he was returning to Washington "so that I'm not a distraction".
Those ruing his intervention the most were the candidates he'd appeared with, such as Patrick Murphy, an impressive 33-year-old Iraq veteran poised to pick up a House seat outside Philadelphia. Kerry went there recently to attack Republicans who "think they've served because they played with GI dolls".
In tight seats like that, Kerry could tip victory into defeat. Even if his party overcomes this late setback and prevails on Tuesday, Kerry's hopes for the White House in 2008 are disappearing faster than Democrats can run away from him.
Scary that these scary people (Gore, Kerry) get so close. Shows you how many idiots we have in this country.
"hopes for the White House in 2008"?
What's that guy been smoking?
Thanks--I feel like I was expecting a shirt or a tie and got a house and a sports car instead.
To Toby Harnden:
No, there is NOT a question mark except in the universe of liberal spin. GWB flew the F-102 Delta Dart as part of the Air National Guard who had the duty to protect the continental US against nuclear attack. Every time he put on the g-suit and strapped himself into the cockpit, he faced death on a personal basis. Sitting air defense alerts, scrambling on an intercept whether drill or real was not the same duty as being an Admiral's aide in New York. It might not be considered combat in the classical sense but ask the widows of pilots killed by the F-102 if they thought it was safe duty and you can guess at the answer. Ask your RAF pilots how they felt about their duty during the late 60's and early 70's. Did it count or were they skating it too? Let's put Kerry's "combat" statements into proper context for the times and tell him to "knock it off."
Carthart?
Beautiful!
Me too!
So becoming President of the U.S. falls short of doing "well". What a crackpot. Nice try.
I was thinking LL Bean barn coat since it is on a northeastern poseur, but it's too orangey, so it probably is Carrhartt.
"I botched the joke"
You botched your aspirations.
It is ironic that George Bush volunteered to join a unit which at the time was being cycled into combat in Vietnam, but that ended before he finished training; while John Kerry volunteered to a unit which was kept far from combat, but was deployed into Vietnemese rivers while he was in training.
Sorta like "seared in his memory?"
Actually, there was a funnier Kerry story I remember from teh 2004 campaign. While on a campaign bus tour through Ohio, the Kerry campaign made a big deal about publicly stopping to get a carryout lunch at Wendy's. Once they got it on the bus, they tossed it away and ate croissants with brie and watercress (a typical Ohio autoworkers' lunch), as I recall.
Correction:
Kerry served with some questionable distinction in Vietnam.
As was asserted by well over 100 of his colleagues.
That's two against the rats. This is now a fair fight.
"i am having so much fun watching that a-hole's political career die by his own hand."
i like "that sc%mb%g's political career" better.
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