Excuses, excuses from Kerry

JOHN KERRY has emerged from post-defeat reflection to do a round of TV interviews, and his underlying message is clear: He did as well as anyone could have done against George W. Bush. In his series of sit-downs, Kerry argued, as he put it to NECN, "No one has ever beaten an incumbent president in time of war." That even though Bush was widely judged beatable by Kerry's own team -- and despite the further fact that Kerry led Bush in the polls for most of July and well into August.

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The senator offered up several other interesting pieces of spin: Switch 50,000 to 60,000 votes in Ohio and he'd have won. Make that 68,242 and it's true, though under those circumstances, Kerry would have been more of a minority president than Bush after the 2000 results.

And this: "You look at the battleground states, we actually had more cumulative votes than George Bush did. We just didn't get it all in the right state."

Now, it's one thing to say, as Al Gore did, that he received more popular votes nationwide than Bush. But there's no commensurate moral victory in claiming a popular vote win in the battleground states alone, as though those states somehow constitute a separate country.

Yet Kerry's argument is revealing for this reason: It seems designed to buttress the notion that his campaign was competitive enough not to foreclose another try in a party that seldom grants a second chance.

Certainly Kerry deserves credit for running a spirited race. Yet there's an aspect of denial to the picture he painted this week.

On the positive side, Kerry's debate performances were strong and convincing. He displayed an impressive knowledge of the issues. His effort, meanwhile, raised large sums and energized the Democratic base.

But it's also true that the senator was a hot-and-cold candidate, his team a long-tolerated assemblage of clashing personalities, the campaign it conducted a roller-coaster ride of pleasing rises followed by disappointing drops. Although Kerry refused to reflect on them, the reality is that he made some serious mistakes -- mistakes that left one wondering whether he had really learned the basic lessons of Michael Dukakis's failed 1988 effort.

Several stand out. Having warned repeatedly that his foes had best not question his patriotism, Kerry watched flatfooted when the inaptly named Swift Boat Veterans for Truth launched a dishonest but damaging summer assault on his character. That scurrilous ambush was well into its second unanswered week before Kerry countermanded myopic campaign advice to ignore it and ordered a concerted counterattack.

Kerry seemed just as blind to the damage that came of his own March statement on the $87 billion for troops operations in Iraq: "I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it." Having given the Bush campaign a comment that seemed to encapsulate the very political expediency they accused him of, Kerry let months go by before making a high-profile attempt to neutralize the harm from that remark.

Another blunder came on Aug. 9, when Kerry was asked whether he would have voted for the Iraq war resolution even knowing Iraq had no WMD. Yes, Kerry answered, saying it was "the right authority for a president to have" -- further muddying an Iraq stance that was already hard to explain. The candidate didn't hear the entirety of the question, the Kerry camp has since suggested. A Newsweek postmortem of the campaign, meanwhile, says Kerry blamed Stephanie Cutter, his thirtysomething communications director, for urging him to answer yes to a question they knew was coming.

Whatever the case, Bush for several days had been pressing Kerry on whether he would have gone to war knowing what they now did; thus it's hard to think the candidate didn't understand what the essential issue was. Even if Cutter did give poor advice, Kerry, a US senator who ran touting his foreign policy seasoning, should have known better than to follow it.

Then there's the question of whether Kerry should have devoted as much time as he did in the final days of his campaign to a ripped-from-the-headlines highlighting of the apparent postinvasion looting of explosives in Iraq, a criticism that seemed to reduce his message to the failed Dukakis formula of competence, not ideology.

In his Tuesday interviews, Kerry repeatedly insisted he's looking forward, not worrying about the past. Still, in politics, the past is always prologue. That's why those mistakes are sure to be revisited should Kerry decide to run again.

Scot Lehigh's e-mail address is lehigh@globe.com.