The Lies, foibles and misrepresentations of John Kerry

Kerry has been around the block. He understnads that every word he says will be parsed and can be spun to his opponent's advantage.

That's where I think you don't understand American politics, nimh. American's are lazy voters. Most do not spend more than a few minutes finding out about the candidates. The depend on political ads that are deceptive, manipulative and neatly packaged.

[..] The truth is that, far from being a hero, Kerry has always been an awkward fit among the blue-collar Catholics who dominate the Massachusetts Democratic machine.

That tension dates back to Kerry's first, unsuccessful run for Congress in 1972, when he twice publicly changed his mind over which district he would claim as his home. (Kerry's wife even bought a house in working-class Worcester, where he had never lived; after Kerry chose a more suitable district closer to Boston, they never moved in to the Worcester home.) That district-shopping first introduced Kerry to local leaders--who have an intense, often tribal, sense of political geography--as an opportunist lacking strong local roots. ("There was a brashness to it," Kerry recently admitted to The Boston Globe.) He lost the race to an unimpressive opponent.

By 1984, Kerry was the state's sitting lieutenant governor and was running for an open Senate seat. Once again, local Democrats were less than enthusiastic about him. [..] As a result, Massachusetts Dems went so far as to deny him the endorsement of their state convention (something that had also eluded Kerry in the run for lieutenant governor two years before). After a bitter primary campaign, Kerry edged out his opponent by less than 25,000 votes. [..]

In the Senate, Kerry was able to avoid the hostile Boston political milieu. "He went to Washington and we never heard from him again," says the legislator. Unlike Ted Kennedy, who toiled away on pocketbook issues dear to the state's urban Democrats, Kerry preferred geopolitics--taking on issues like Iran-Contra, the BCCI banking scandal, and U.S. relations with Vietnam. When Kerry wrote a book in 1997, it was a long treatise on emerging global threats. If Tip O'Neill ever explained to Kerry his theory that all politics is local, Kerry showed no sign of absorbing it.

Back in Boston, machine Democrats complained that Kerry paid little attention to them. Several legislators explained to Globe columnist Eileen McNamara last month that they never felt they could call Kerry for help. "Why bother?" one asked. "You'd be lucky to have anyone on his staff call you back." Around class-conscious Boston, where blue-collar pols were already suspicious of his Brahmin upbringing, Kerry developed a reputation for fancying himself above the scrum of retail politics, and more preoccupied with his own future than with the state party. And he paid for it. When Kerry once arrived late for a gathering of state Democrats, one cracked from the podium that Kerry had gotten "stuck in front of a mirror." After Kerry made a last-minute cancellation on a local Democratic event a few years ago, an irritated official sent out an email with the header: "GOOD NEWS! JOHN KERRY ISN'T COMING!"

Or consider the ambivalence toward Kerry felt by one state Democratic politico, a networked liberal who agrees with him on most issues. This Democrat has met Kerry numerous times over many years, shares close friends with him, and once even provided critical assistance to a Kerry campaign, about which he is certain Kerry was aware. And yet, he says, "as recently as three or four years ago I could be standing next to John and he wouldn't know my name." At one event several years ago Kerry ignored the man until they were "introduced," at which point Kerry pumped the man's hand with exaggerated familiarity. "I had been in his line of sight for five minutes without him recognizing me," the Democrat says. "Then he acts like we're old buddies!" Too late. "It was one of those embarrassing situations where everybody knew who I was, and he knew he was supposed to know," but plainly didn't. (What bothers this Democrat most, however, is the transformation Kerry underwent once he decided to run for president. "The next time I saw him," he says, "he made this big show of walking across the lawn and shouting [my name] for everyone to hear.")

The complaints weren't limited to minor local politicos. Fellow members of the state's congressional delegation often griped that Kerry did little to land funding for state projects like the Big Dig. ("[H]e overstudies issues without taking action," is how the Globe put it. Barney Frank has likened dealing with Kerry's office to "taking your Ph.D. orals.") [..]

Now all that seems forgotten. [..] So how have Massachusetts pols learned to love the man they once loved to hate? Part of it may be a sense of Kerry as their son of a bitch. Part of it may be some genuine recent progress Kerry has made at stroking local egos. And then there's self-interest. Everyone assumes that a President Kerry will remember who helped him and who didn't. Says a Democratic legislator: "All these guys who didn't like him and didn't take him seriously, but felt like, 'Oh we have to be with him because he's the local guy'--[last] week a lot of them got religion." That's something less than a deep belief in Kerry as a great future president. But after suffering years of Boston brickbats, John Kerry will take all the converts he can find.

here's a man who wants to be all things to everyone. That's gotten him into trouble already back home, since he invariably ends up semi-lying -- and thats going to be picked up on by the media and torn apart, trust me.

if Mr. Kerry has tapped into voters' rational desire for a winner, Mr. Edwards appears to have touched something more visceral. In Oklahoma, where Mr. Edwards dueled General Clark to a virtual draw, more than 4 in 10 voters most concerned about picking a candidate who cared about people like them chose Mr. Edwards, compared with just under 2 in 10 for Mr. Kerry and 3 in 10 for General Clark. Among voters who cited the economy and jobs as the issue that mattered most in determining their choice, Mr. Edwards won 37 percent, compared with 27 percent for Mr. Kerry.

In South Carolina, where Mr. Edwards was born the son of a millworker, nearly one-quarter of voters said the most important quality in choosing a candidate was whether he cared about people like them, and Mr. Edwards won nearly 6 in 10 of this vote, as against 2 in 10 for Mr. Kerry. And among the nearly 50 percent of South Carolinians who cited the economy as the most important deciding issue, Mr. Edwards won just over half the vote, compared with just over one-quarter for Mr. Kerry.

Mr. Edwards also fared better among self-described independent voters, who, if not quite the typical swing voters of a general election, perhaps came closest on Tuesday to reflecting moods among the overall electorate. In Oklahoma, where the contest was so close and independents accounted for just over 10 percent of the vote, Mr. Edwards drew 34 percent of independents, followed by General Clark, with 28 percent, and Mr. Kerry, with 18 percent.

Even in Missouri, where Mr. Kerry won by more than 25 percentage points over Mr. Edwards and independents accounted for a quarter of the electorate, Mr. Kerry drew just 37 percent of the independent vote, compared with 57 percent of Democrats. And even while losing badly over all in Missouri, Mr. Edwards drew the support of 28 percent of independents.

revel

You have no good historical cause for despair. Clinton, Reagan and the sitting presdient, for example, all looked highly unelectable at certain points in their campaigns.

The Rove strategy will, as you suggest, be pregnant with the typical lies and personal slanders we've seen from him before, supported by whatever unprincipled tricks his crowd can muster to keep democrats out of the polling stations.

This time, because folks are increasingly coming to understand the degree to which Bush is an idealogue and extremist (and therefore, how dangerous he is), it seems likely that the trend to high voter turnout that we've seen in the primaries will carry over to the election. [..] If the Dems fail, it will be ONLY because they did not work hard enough to get out the vote.