“You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework, you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.”
- John Kerry
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Kerry Digs a Deeper Hole
The Chicago Tribune
Did John Kerry (D-Mass.) help himself in his Seattle news conference this afternoon to explain his astonishing remarks yesterday which sounded like an elitist shot at the intelligence of members of the U.S. military serving in Iraq? Short answer: no.
An angry Kerry tried to give his supporters and Democrats something to fight back with when he said: “My statement yesterday, and the White House knows this full well, was a botched joke about the president and the president’s people, not about the troops.
“… If anyone thinks that a veteran, someone like me who’s been fighting my entire career to provide for veterans to fight for their benefits, to help honor what their service is, if anybody thinks that a veteran would somehow criticize more than 140,000 troops fighting in Iraq and not the president and his people who put them there, they’re crazy. It’s just wrong….”
But here’s the problem. In his moment of high dudgeon, he may have made matters worse. It probably wasn’t a good idea to accuse everyone who saw the video of his campaign appearance and thought he was disparaging the IQ of U.S. troops of being “crazy.”
CNN has reported that David Wade, Kerry’s communications director (a challenging job as you can imagine) says what Kerry should’ve said was this: “I can't overstress the importance of a great education. Do you know where you end up if you don't study, if you aren't smart, if you're intellectually lazy? You end up getting us stuck in a war in Iraq.”
Let’s give Kerry the benefit of the doubt and stipulate he muffed his line. Wouldn’t it still have been wiser for him to humbly apologize to the troops directly for the misunderstanding that he, after all, caused?
You don’t have to be a right-wing radio talk show host to look at the video from Kerry’s campaign appearance yesterday and believe that he was indeed implying that those serving in Iraq are academic losers, there because they had no other choices.
It’s a safe guess that millions of Americans, including many Democrats, who saw the initial Kerry video have been shaking their collective heads all day wondering what was on his mind.
Kerry appears to have concluded that he’s being “swiftboated” all over again just like in 2004 and that the only correct response is to fight back. He even said as much:
“Let me tell you something, I'm not going to give them one ounce of daylight to spread one of their lies and to play this game ever, ever again. That is a lesson I learned deep and hard, and I'll tell you, I will stand up anywhere across this country and take these guys on.”
But he’s making the mistake generals are always warned against; he's fighting the last war.
His advisors in 2004 persuaded him take the high road and not quickly respond when he was being swiftboated then.
Because he didn’t follow standard political doctrine and respond quickly and decisively to Republican charges about what he did in Vietnam, he may have lost the White House.
But this wasn’t a swiftboat operation. Instead, Kerry was struck by his own torpedo which circled back after he launched it to explode right in front of him.
Meanwhile, the White House has taken the rare step of distributing an advanced copy of a campaign speech President Bush will deliver this afternoon.
The president's prepared remarks say:
“Yesterday Democrat Senator John Kerry was speaking to a group of young people in California, and gave them this advice, quote: “You know 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 Senator’s suggestion that the men and women of our military are somehow uneducated is insulting and shameful. Our troops did not enlist because they did not study hard in school or do their homework. The men and women who serve in our all-volunteer Armed Forces are plenty smart and are serving because they are patriots – and Senator Kerry owes them an apology.”
For Bush, this must be like being a championship boxer who gets another chance to relive one of his greatest knockouts. He gets to throw haymakers again at the same awkward opponent who kept dropping his guard in 2004, and who two years later still hasn't learned his lesson.
John Green, a political scientist and director of the Ray C. Bliss Institute at the University of Akron, has a good summation of the dynamic on this between the two adversaries.
"Sen. Kerry has a history of saying unfortunate things and then not being able to explain them, because they are inexplicable,'' Green said.
Kerry's remark benefits Bush because "The president has basically decided to embrace Iraq (in the closing week of the campaign). Incidents like this enable him to embrace Iraq without talking about Iraq… At least for the moment, he can have it both ways..’’
