The Chris Moeller Archives

The debutante from Massachusetts

With enemies like John Kerry, who needs friends? The Senator from Massachusetts stepped in it again this week when he told a group of California college students, "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." Kerry claims he was referring to the President being stuck in Iraq with a failed military policy, but the White House jumped on the statement and asserted that the Senator was referring to the U.S. troops themselves.

Like that other phony populist who preceeded him in the White House, George W. Bush owes more of his electoral success to the incompetency and missteps of his critics than to any individual asset of his own possession. It's better to be lucky, the lesson goes, than to be good.

My guess is that Kerry probably meant it both ways. I find it easy to believe, as the Senator contends, that he mistold a joke directed at Bush, whom he often belittles on the stump, but at the same time, that's exactly how Kerry's northeastern crowd thinks. I truly believe that. And every time they lose another national election, it reinforces their belief that they're more enlightened than those of us in the hinterland. You don't have to be a Rush Limbaugh ditto-head to feel the disconnect. This is a guy who's wife, during the 2004 Presidential campaign, told a crowd in Chicago that their city was so beautiful "she could live there." That's the mindset of privilege.

And notice many Democrats are coming to Kerry's defense by arguing that it is the poor that are forced to serve in uniform, but that's not what Kerry is in trouble for having said. If guilty, the implication is not that recruits are predominantly poor, it's that they were too lazy in school. Suddenly, all of those old jokes about rich Republicans apply as well or better to the Democrat's top public figures-- i.e., He was born with a silver foot in his mouth, or He was born on third base and thought he hit a triple.

Not since roughly 1972 has John Kerry shown us any authenticity. Like Al Gore before him, he was manhandled as the Democrats' standard-bearer by the party's chief campaign strategists and fuck-ups and then tried to salvage his liberal bona-fides in a second act by steering to the left, but that maneuver rings hollow also when it's so far after the fact and every approval poll on the war and the president is on his side. And how depressing is it that he's one of the only Washington Democrats willing to oppose the war now or stand against his deeply-entrenched colleague "GOP Joe" Lieberman. Kerry's not a leader. He never has been. He's a resume. And Democrats think resumes win campaigns.

The good that will come from this is that Kerry will be relegated to the trash heap of 2008 presidential candidates before he has a chance to do any more significant damage. Said Dick Cheney today about Kerry's efforts to try to regain his public footing, "He was for the joke before he was against it." When Cheney's scoring on you, it's time to bow out.

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All of the above pales in comparison, of course, to the most deeply-rooted insults of all to our troops, being perpetuated by President Bush with his lies, his lack of vision and his empty platitudes. His reaffirmation today of Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense in the face of all common sense and dignity is a dizzying slap in the face to service men and women and civilians alike. I'll wait breathlessly for a Democratic response.

posted by CM @ 8:23 PM