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.

ALBUQUERQUE, Feb. 2 ?- Senator John Kerry had just taken the stage on Saturday at a packed rally at the Oklahoma State Firefighters Memorial in Oklahoma City, and he was fired up. "George Bush thought he could play dress-up on an aircraft carrier and you wouldn't notice," he thundered. "Ask yourself, whose mission is accomplished?"

As if on cue, the audience roared back, "His mission!" Mr. Kerry just smiled and deadpanned, "Nobody briefed me that I was going to have a real interactive crowd here."

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For so long, of course, Mr. Kerry did not, and to see him on the stump these days is to conduct an unscientific but revealing study in candidate development and crowd psychology. Mr. Kerry says most of the same things he has been saying for weeks or even months, but he says them better and now that he is the Democratic front-runner the crowds respond in kind.

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Two years ago, Mr. Kerry's advisers tried to get him to loosen up by showing him tapes of Senator John Edwards's easygoing style. Even now, he lacks Bill Clinton's innate, empathetic artistry with individuals and crowds. But as his campaign moves onto a national stage, where television advertisements and sound bites are more important than one-on-one encounters, Mr. Kerry seems comfortable with a kind of paint-by-numbers Clintonism that is effective in its own way. He asks people their names, and their stories. After his brush with political near-death, he is smiling, even laughing, more ?- and the results are infectious.

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At every stop, it seems, Mr. Kerry announces a new endorsement. Here it was Attorney General Eliot L. Spitzer of New York. On Saturday in Oklahoma, as Mr. Kerry ran through the litany of his latest supporters, an interrupting voice rang out from the hall, "Senator, I am the mayor of Watonga, Okla., and I endorse you!"

Without hesitating, Mr. Kerry did something that would have been all but unthinkable in his awkward months of campaigning in New Hampshire last fall: He scrambled down into the crowd, wrapped an arm around Mayor Richard Hightower, chief magistrate of the nearby town of 3,200, and swept him back onto the stage, holding his hand aloft and declaring, "Ladies and gentlemen, my latest endorsement."

-snip-

But he speaks with unshakable assurance, and he is winning converts.

"I have been a Dean supporter up until today," said Charles Brittain, a retired industrial engineer for the Air Force who came to see Mr. Kerry in Oklahoma City. "I liked what he was saying, but what I saw was a vulnerability at the slightest sign of pressure. I believe I see in Kerry a man who can withstand the hurricane that I'm positive the Republicans are planning."

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.

WASHINGTON - John Kerry (news - web sites) intervened in the Senate to keep open a loophole that had allowed a major insurer to divert millions of federal dollars from the nation's most expensive construction project, then received tens of thousand of dollars in donations from the company during the next two years, documents show.

American International Group paid Kerry's way on a trip to Vermont and donated at least $30,000 to a tax-exempt group Kerry used to set up his presidential campaign. Company executives also donated $18,000 to his Senate and presidential campaigns, according to records obtained by The Associated Press.


But Kerry, the current leader of the Democratic presidential race, says there was no connection between his actions in 2000 and the donations that followed in 2001 and 2002.


"John Kerry has long supported getting special interest money out of the political system," campaign spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter said. "If anybody believes that a political contribution influences John Kerry then they are wasting their money."


But some government watchdogs said Kerry's story is a textbook case of Washington special interest politicking that he rails against on the presidential trail.


"The idea that Kerry has not helped or benefited from a specific special interest, which he has said, is utterly absurd," said Charles Lewis, head of the Center for Public Integrity that just published a book on political donations to the presidential candidates.


"Anyone who gets millions of dollars over time, and thousands of dollars from specific donors, knows there's a symbiotic relationship," Lewis said. "He needs the donors' money. The donors need favors. Welcome to Washington. That is how it works."


The documents obtained by AP detail Kerry's effort as a member of the Senate Commerce Committee to persuade committee chairman John McCain, R-Ariz., to drop legislation that would have stripped $150 million from the Big Dig project and ended the insurance funding loophole.


The Massachusetts Democrat actually was critical of the loophole but didn't want money stripped from the project because it would hurt his constituents who needed the Boston project finished, Cutter said.


When the "AIG investment scheme (came) to light, John Kerry called for public hearings to investigate the parties involved and the legality of the investment practices. However, he firmly believed cutting funding for the Big Dig was not the answer," Cutter said.


Instead of McCain's bluntly worded legislation, Kerry asked for a committee hearing in May 2000. Kerry thanked McCain at the start of the hearing for dropping his legislation and an AIG executive was permitted to testify that he believed the company's work for the Big Dig was a good thing even though it was criticized by federal auditors.


"From the perspective of public and worker safety and cost control, AIG's insurance program has been a success," AIG executive Richard Thomas testified.


Asked why Kerry would subsequently accept a trip and money from AIG in 2001 and 2002 if he was concerned by the investment scheme, Cutter replied: "Any contributions AIG made to the senator's campaign came years after the investigation."


The New York-based insurer, one of the world's largest, declined to comment on its donations to Kerry, simply stating, "AIG never requested any assistance from Senator Kerry concerning the insurance we provided the Big Dig."


The Big Dig project has become a symbol of government contracting gone awry, known for its huge cost overruns that now total several billion dollars, and its admissions of mismanagement.


During the 1990s, Sens. Kerry and Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., helped win new federal funding for the project as its costs skyrocketed and threatened to burden the state's government. In 1998, Kerry was credited with winning $100 million in new federal funding.


But in 1999, Transportation Department auditors discovered that Big Dig managers had overpaid $129.8 million to AIG for worker compensation and liability insurance that wasn't needed, then allowed the insurer to keep the money in a trust and invest it in the market. The government alleged AIG kept about half of the profits it made from the investments, providing the other half to the project.





Outraged by the revelations, McCain submitted legislation that would have stripped $150 million from the Big Dig and banned the practice of allowing an insurer to invest and profit from excessive premiums paid with government money.

"Any refunds of insurance premiums or reserve amounts, including interest, that exceed a project's liabilities shall be immediately returned to the federal government," McCain's legislation said.

But Kerry and Kennedy intervened, and McCain withdrew the legislation in 2000 in favor of the hearing.

At that hearing, the Transportation's Department inspector general made a renewed plea for a permanent federal policy banning the overpayment of insurance premiums and subsequent investment for profit ?- what McCain had proposed and Kerry helped kill.

"The policy is needed to ensure that projects do not attempt to draw down federal funds for investment purposes under the guise that they are needed to pay insurance claims," the inspector general told senators.

In September 2001, AIG paid an estimated $540 in travel expenses to cover Kerry's costs for a speech in Burlington, Vt., according to a Senate report filed by Kerry.

A few months later in December 2001, several AIG executives gave maximum $1,000 donations to Kerry's Senate campaign on the same day. The donations totaled $9,700 and were followed by several thousand dollars more over the next two years.

Kerry wasn't the only committee member to get AIG donations. In 1999 and early 2000 as the Big Dig issue was pending, McCain received several thousand dollars in donations from executives of the insurer, the records show.

In spring 2002, AIG donated $10,000 to a new tax-exempt group Kerry formed, the Citizen Soldier Fund, to lay groundwork for his presidential campaign. Later that same year, AIG gave two more donations of $10,000 each to the same group, making it one of the largest corporate donors to Kerry's group.

The insurer wasn't the only company connected to the Big Dig to donate to Kerry's new group. Two construction companies on the project ?- Modern Continental Group and Jay Cashman Construction ?- each donated $25,000, IRS records show.

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.