In outreach, Kerry posts to a liberal political blog
Bin Laden, Bush, Alito among topics he takes to task
WASHINGTON -- In an effort to reach grass-roots liberal activists, Senator John F. Kerry has begun posting entries to a blog that his presidential campaign disavowed in 2004.
Kerry has posted three entries in the past two weeks to DailyKos.com, a popular website known for freewheeling political discussions and left-wing bent.
The Massachusetts Democrat distanced himself from the site, which was linked to his campaign website, in 2004 after what his campaign termed an unacceptable comment by the site's author about the slayings of four US contractors in the Iraqi city of Fallujah. The bodies of two of the contractors had been hung from an iron bridge over the Euphrates River.
The site's author, Markos Moulitsas, called the contractors ''mercenaries," and added, ''They are there to wage war for profit" and then dismissed them with a profanity.
Kerry's staff declined to comment on why the senator now feels comfortable writing on the blog. But comments posted by DailyKos readers welcomed his apparent change of heart. As of yesterday, Kerry's three posts had attracted about 3,000 mostly positive responses.
Kerry's first entry, posted Jan. 20 after the release of Osama bin Laden's latest taped message, criticized the media's coverage of what he implied was US negligence in capturing bin Laden since 2001.
His most recent entry, posted last Thursday, explained his decision to seek a filibuster to block the confirmation of Samuel A. Alito Jr. to the Supreme Court.
Several readers of the site initially expressed skepticism that the senator had actually authored the entries, but Kerry's office confirmed last week he had written them himself.
Kerry ''likes the debate and the smart, passionate voices in the blogosphere who care about our country and are determined to cut through the Washington spin," said spokeswoman April Boyd.
Several other Democratic politicians, including Representative John Conyers of Michigan, Representative Louise Slaughter of New York, and Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, have posted to DailyKos, which says it reaches more than 4 million readers each week.
Moulitsas, the author of DailyKos, said Kerry's posts had been entirely the senator's idea and that the response from readers was similar to that for other high-profile politicians.
''The only heads-up I got was from an aide making sure I knew the account was legitimate and not someone pretending to be Kerry," he said via e-mail.
In his first entry last month, Kerry said that his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, ''reads blogs passionately" and that he wasn't worried about ''taking some slings and arrows" on the Internet.
During the presidential primaries, Kerry's campaign was by its own admission slow to take advantage of the Internet, lagging behind Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor whose candidacy surged in 2003 on the strength of his Web presence and the support of Democratic blogs, DailyKos among them.
In September 2003, Kerry said in a Globe interview: ''I fingered the Internet early on as very important, but unfortunately some things moved too slowly and didn't get in place as fast I'd wanted it to."
His campaign got another reminder of the power of the Internet when right-wing websites circulated rumors about his Vietnam service in the months before the 2004 election.
Responses to Kerry's postings were mostly positive, but some readers criticized him for not contesting the election results in Ohio.
''Sit down, John. Your 15 minutes are up," said one comment.
DailyKos, which takes its name from the nickname Moulitsas went by while serving in the Army, raised $500,000 for Democratic candidates in 2004. Moulitsas was recently described in The Washington Monthly magazine as the ''world's biggest political blogger." 