After itching for a fight, senator gets battered
WASHINGTON -- For two years, Senator John F. Kerry has been hungering for a chance to fight back.
He has apologized for failing to understand the significance of the "swift boat" attacks on his military record that helped sink his 2004 presidential campaign. He has taken on quixotic tasks such as the attempted filibuster of Samuel A. Alito's Supreme Court nomination. He has sharpened his critique of the Bush administration to the point where even liberal bloggers who felt he had blown the presidential election were praising him.
So when Republican leaders demanded he apologize for a verbal misstep in California on Monday, where he declared that low-performing students would get "stuck in Iraq," Kerry came out with both guns blazing. This time, he would attack: The president, he thundered, is the one who should be apologizing -- for his war policies.
But yesterday, Republicans used Kerry's non-apology to launch the kind of concerted attack he'd warned about in his Tuesday afternoon press conference. Kerry was under heavy fire again, this time with no weapons left to fire back.
Democratic congressional candidates, sensing victory next week, simply wanted to steer clear of the mess. Some were angry enough over the 11th-hour distraction to disavow Kerry. And their abandonment made Kerry seem culpable, at the very least, of stealing attention from the real issues.
It also left him in an unenviable political dilemma: keep fighting with the GOP and earn even more enmity from the Democrats, or lay low while Republican heavyweights like Vice President Dick Cheney use him as a punching bag.
"John Kerry needs to learn that the men and women serving in Iraq aren't there because they didn't study hard or do their homework," declared Cheney. "The all-volunteer force represents the very best of this country. They're smart, patriotic, exceptionally well-trained, and dedicated to their mission. They are heroes, and they are the pride of the United States of America."
Cheney's swipe was disingenuous, since Kerry had already declared that his comments were a botched joke aimed at Bush. Kerry also made it clear on Tuesday that he had not intended to criticize 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 serving in Iraq and not the president and his people who put them there, they're crazy," Kerry said on Tuesday.
He also, in his inimitably long-winded way, called the attacks on him "a classic GOP textbook Republican campaign tactic."
There's plenty of evidence to suggest he's right. Republicans have snatched up sound bites of leading Democrats and used them to impugn their patriotism; when former Vermont governor Howard Dean was leading in many presidential polls, Republicans pounded him with his statement that Saddam Hussein's capture would not make Americans safer.
Kerry, Dean's rival at the time for the Democratic nomination, happily poured gas on the flames, criticizing Dean for failing to understand the American people's profound sense of relief at Hussein's capture. (As it happens, Dean has been proven right: Attacks on American troops did not abate after Hussein's capture.)
Later, when groups backing Bush declared, with just fragments of evidence, that Kerry had embellished his military record, the criticism stuck -- even though most of the allegations were ultimately disproven.
The lesson, according to most Democratic strategists, was to fight back fiercely and immediately.
Kerry, while testing the waters for another presidential run, has sought to atone for his alleged mishandling of the "swift boat" attacks in innumerable ways, most recently by rushing to the side of Democratic House candidates who've had their own military records questioned.
But Kerry isn't on the ballot this year, and when Bush and his loyalists sought to make an issue of Kerry's statement about low-performing students "stuck in Iraq," he probably could have ducked out of the line of attack.
He didn't -- partly for his own satisfaction, and partly to make a big statement about how deeply unfair and distracting such "textbook" Republican attacks can be.
Unfortunately for Kerry, too many Democrats regard him as the distraction.
"He's rebutting the swift boat attacks at this time, and what he needed to say was, 'I apologize,' " said Kathleen Hall Jamieson of the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School of Communication. "This is a failure on his part, and it is a failure on the part of his staff for not realizing it." 