Kerry Goes Ballistic

Here's a bulletin from the 2004 presidential campaign trail: The junior senator from Massachusetts, and anointed frontrunner for the Democratic nomination, is a Vietnam veteran.

Because of this fact, which John Forbes de Villepin Kerry hammers home in every campaign speech, the candidate and his advisers (including two of the most noxious men in politics today, Robert Shrum and Chris Lehane) are in attack mode. Kerry reasons he's earned the right to make outrageous statements about President Bush even as U.S. soldiers are dying in Iraq. Speaking in New Hampshire on April 2, Kerry told a library audience that Bush has alienated the impotent United Nations, committing a "breach of trust" since a majority of countries wanted to give Hans Blix a chance.

Kerry then delivered a soundbite that's typical of the arrogance that's marked his calculated political career. "What we need now is not just a regime change in Saddam Hussein and Iraq," he said, "but we need a regime change in the United States." The proudly aristocratic senator had made the same glib remark at a Democratic gathering in Sacramento just before the war started, so this wasn't an off-the-cuff gaffe. If Kerry wants to contend in the Democratic primaries, he needs a tutor who can explain the difference between a standard political jab and a rhetorical time bomb.

"Regime change" has a certain definition in the United States today: It means ridding Iraq of a dictator who tortures, maims and executes his own citizens at the merest hint of dissent or betrayal. Just imagine if a mass-murderer ruled this country, which is thankfully a cauldron of protest and debate. It's your turn for the firing squad, Mr. Charles Rangel, right next to Tom Daschle, Nancy Pelosi, Howell Raines, Albert Hunt, Jules Witcover and Gore Vidal. The left-of-center media has long been liquidated, Charlie, and Jesse Jackson has escaped to Cuba at the invitation of Fidel Castro.

It's an indication of Kerry's predicament that two liberal columnists from the Boston Globe and Boston Herald have sadly concluded that the senator is in danger of blowing what many concluded was a surefire opportunity to challenge Bush next year. The Globe's Thomas Oliphant, perhaps the mushiest Beltway pundit, must've shed a tear when he wrote the following words in his April 6 column: "It is always dumb to hand opponents an easy attack line. It's also misguided to use the word regime, with an antidemocratic connotation, about the United States. President Bush leads an administration, a government. Popular votes and Florida aside, his presidency is the result of constitutional process and it is legitimate. [The New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg might want to take note of Oliphant's use of the word "legitimate."] Regime implies otherwise. It is used for dictators and authoritarians, based on its Latin root that is all about ruling, not governing."

The Herald's Wayne Woodlief was more direct: "Tacky language, Long Jawn, in even appearing to put the president and the sadistic Iraqi dictator on the same footing. And terrible timing, just as our troops reached the very doorsteps of Baghdad."

Even worse for Kerry, his burst of unseemly partisanship was echoed last Saturday by Michigan's Rep. John Conyers, one of the most despicable and polarizing members of Congress. At a protest march in Detroit, the bombastic Conyers called the war, which Kerry voted to authorize, "unconstitutional and immoral." He continued, in a de facto endorsement of the senator (sorry, Al Sharpton!): "Well, George Bush, on November 2, 2004, there will be the biggest regime change you have ever seen... A big regime change. That's what we're preparing for."

Kerry, who was embarrassed by lightweight Sen. John Edwardswho didn't serve in Vietnamby coming in second to the North Carolinian in raising money during the first quarter of this year, is now in a real Heinz pickle. What's the new game plan? I suppose he can continue his hyperbolic criticism of Bush and congressional Republicans, which will earn him the probably unwanted support of fringe publications like the Nation and Salon, and battle Howard Dean for the antiwar vote. That'd be swell, since such a course is sure to irreparably damage his campaign.

On Sunday, stumping in Iowa, Kerry revealed his 2004 platform. He said: "I am running to end forever the Republican politics of wedge issues and character attack and distortions made under the guise of patriotism, which undermine the definition of true love of country." You'd think Kerry might realize that's he's running against Bush, and not Tom DeLay or Denny Hastert, but apparently the legislator is looking for a schoolboy rumble rather than running the country.

A smarter plan would be to lie low for a month, following the example of his main opponents, Rep. Dick Gephardt and Sen. Joe Lieberman. Gephardt, right now, appears to be the real frontrunner for the Democratic nomination. While he hasn't matched Edwards or Kerry in collecting New York and Hollywood checks, the bland, veteran congressman has plotted a sound strategy for the primaries next year. He's hawkish on the war, not uttering a peep of criticism once the military began its invasion, and is patiently waiting for its conclusion before attacking Bush on domestic issues. Gephardt, unlike Kerry, knows that the 2004 election will be a referendum on Bush, and if the economy is flailing, any temperamentally balanced Democrat has a decent shot of winning.

Kerry's arrogance in blasting Bush on foreign policy might win votes in Iowa and New Hampshire, but won't be received well in the South or rustbelt states. It's true that the president was stateside during Vietnam, a generation ago, but if Kerry campaigns on the plank that he's a more experienced leader in global affairs, he's sunk.

Bush is a wartime president who's exhibited remarkable resolve in not only protecting the United States in the wake of Sept. 11, but advancing democracy in the troubled Middle East as well. That he proceeded to invade Iraq without the blessing of the United Nations, and intends to rebuild Iraq without France and Germany in a leading role, was not only bold but visionary. Bush understands that acquiescence to his detractorskeen on collecting Saddam-sanctioned debtswould keep Iraq's citizens in terror and ultimately bring dishonor to the United States. Whether the president's plan is vindicated remains to be seen, but foreign policy is not a winning issue for a Democratic opponent.

Michael Kelly, RIP

Many fine tributes to the late journalist Michael Kelly have been writtenMaureen Dowd's last Sunday in the New York Times was both loving and movingand I haven't much to add. Kelly was an acquaintance of minewe'd met several times, spoke on the phone, exchanged emailsbut it was his superb, and devastating, political commentary that'll be most missed to all but his family and close friends like Dowd.

One misconception about Kelly that's become accepted truth is that he was a "neocon," a description that in today's poisonous Beltway climate has become code for a Zionist zeal for American imperialism. Because Kelly, in writing for the Times, New Republic, New Yorker and the Atlantic Monthly, waged a brutal battle against what he correctly perceived as the dishonesty, sleaziness and hypocrisy of the Clintons and Al Gore, it's assumed he was a waterboy for George W. Bush. In fact, Kelly once told me he was a Hubert Humphrey/Scoop Jackson Democrat who despaired about the disgrace Clinton brought upon the party.

During the 2000 presidential campaign, Kelly, in his syndicated Washington Post column, consistently denigrated Bush, at one point calling him a "pinhead" and "someone who [is] seriously not bright." Like much of the press, he belittled the Texas governor in comparison to Sen. John McCain, whom he described as "smart, tough, funny, cool, experienced [and] forthright." In the general election that year, he only preferred Bush, "who is smarter than the average bear, but not a whole lot more," because of Gore's character flaws. Kelly concluded late that September: "And that is the good citizen argument for Bush over Gore. The country can afford a 40-watt president. It cannot afford to allow the Clinton-Gores, corroded to the core, to further define corrosion down."

That is what's called a lukewarm endorsement.

Early in Bush's administration, realizing that verbal brilliance is just one skill a president can possess, Kelly renounced his label of the new president as a "pinhead." But it wasn't until after Sept. 11 that Kelly fully supported Bush, agreeing with his doctrine of preemption and the necessity of ridding the world of Saddam Hussein.

After Bush's historic 2002 State of the Union address Kelly wrote: "George Bush's predecessor accepted a foreign policy modus vivendi that tolerated the existence of regimes and groups actively inimical to America on the grounds that they posed no vital danger. It was not so much a case of live and let live as live and let them kill a few of our Marines... The most telling words in Bush's State of the Union speech were not 'axis of evil.' They were these: 'This campaign may not be finished on our watch, yet it must be and it will be waged on our watch.' Those are the words of a man who sees himself as a wartime president in a war of historic proportions, and they were not spoken for effect."

Pete Hamill eulogized both Kelly and NBC reporter David Bloom in Monday's Daily News. He was kind and sympathetic to the wives and children both men left behind and praised their courage in reporting on the war, but I don't think that Michael Kelly would've cared much for Hamill's words. The News columnist said that Kelly "often demeaned his own considerable talents by using a sneering tone, laced with vicious personal hatredas in his repeated assaults on novelist Norman Mailer. He supported the right-wing Bush policies, domestic and foreign. He sneered at the UN and supported the war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq."

Kelly's writing was honest, and he didn't care if it caused old-timers like Hamill heartburn.

But what the late editor/reporter would've objected to most in Hamill's piece was the following snippet of propaganda. "[Kelly] had something very rare among his fellow neo-cons: the courage of his convictions. At 46, he volunteered to travel with the troops... Paul Wolfowitz didn't resign from Donald Rumsfeld's staff to go the war with foot soldiers."

And Hamill speaks of "vicious personal hatred"? Kelly was a journalist who was determined to witness, for his readers, the end of a brutal regime. Maybe he completely agreed with Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz's policies, maybe he didn't; but it's certain Kelly would never have questioned "the courage of [their convictions]."

He'd leave that to retreads like Hamill.

Send comments to [MUG1988@aol.com](mailto:MUG1988@aol.com).