Some bad news about J Kerry.
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Kerr's Shifts: Nuanced Ideas or Flip-Flops?
March 6, 2004
By DAVID M. HALBFINGER
BOSTON, March 5 - When Senator John Kerry was speaking to
Jewish leaders a few days ago, he said Israel's
construction of a barrier between it and Palestinian
territories was a legitimate act of self-defense. But in
October, he told an Arab-American group that it was
"provocative and counterproductive" and a "barrier to
peace."
On Feb. 5, Mr. Kerry reacted to Massachusetts' highest
court's decision legalizing same-sex marriages by saying,
"I personally believe the court is dead wrong." But when
asked on Feb. 24 why he believed the decision was not
correct, he shot back, "I didn't say it wasn't."
Throughout his campaign, Mr. Kerry has shown a knack for
espousing both sides of divisive issues. Earlier in the
race he struggled to square his vote to authorize the use
of force in Iraq with his loud criticism of the war and his
eventual vote against $87 billion for military operations
and reconstruction.
Now with the general-election campaign under way, President
Bush and Republicans are already attacking Mr. Kerry for
precisely this characteristic. In California this week, the
president said Mr. Kerry had "been in Washington long
enough to take both sides on just about every issue." And
on Friday the Republican National Committee e-mailed to
reporters an Internet boxing game called "Kerry vs. Kerry"
designed, the committee said, to highlight the senator's
"multiple positions on multiple issues."
The e-mail included a list of Mr. Kerry's stances on 30
issues, including many of the examples that were researched
in preparation for this article.
In fact, this trait, perhaps a natural one for a diplomat's
son, seems to have been ingrained in Mr. Kerry's
personality as far back as when he volunteered for duty in
Vietnam after expressing doubts about the war as a college
student - and then returned home and helped lead the
opposition to the war.
Some aides and close associates say Mr. Kerry's fluidity is
the mark of an intellectual who grasps the subtleties of
issues, inhabits their nuances and revels in the
deliberative process. They call him a free-thinker who
defies stereotypes. Others close to him say his
often-public agonizing - over whether to opt out of the
system of spending caps and matching money in this
campaign, or whether to run against Al Gore in 2000 - can
be exasperating.
And some Democratic strategists worry that Mr. Kerry is
still an unfamiliar figure to many voters, and that these
early attacks show just how vulnerable he is to being
defined by the Republicans as indecisive or politically
expedient.
"If Kerry fails to define himself as someone who's been
consistent on values, on foreign policy, on domestic
issues, then the Bush team will have succeeded in putting
him in a corner," said Donna Brazile, who ran Mr. Gore's
campaign in 2000. "They want to get to his integrity and
his character, and they will use his voting record and
previous statements to undermine that he can be trusted."
Other Democrats suggest that the areas in which Mr. Kerry
has showed indecisiveness or tried to split the difference
are the same ones in which most Americans are conflicted.
"Clearly he is trying to walk a very fine line on extremely
divisive social issues like gay marriage and the Patriot
Act," said Ron Klain, another Gore adviser in 2000. "These
are issues where the political terrain is changing very
rapidly, and he is trying to stay in the middle. And I
think he's walking the tightrope on those issues, and doing
a pretty good job of navigating it so far."
Sometimes, Mr. Kerry's stances seem to be well-thought
political strategy. At no time was this more evident than
the day when he spoke against opponents of gun control in
an Iowa barn, then strode out to his car, unwrapped an old
shotgun, and went off to shoot pheasant. The message was
that hunters could be for gun control.
Other times he may tailor his stands to an audience or even
run away from past positions. When Gen. Wesley K. Clark
pointed to a 1992 remark by Mr. Kerry calling affirmative
action "an inherently limited and divisive program," the
senator denied he had ever said that.
Sometimes Mr. Kerry seems to embody contradictions. When he
lost for Congress in 1972, went to law school and became a
prosecutor, he stunned some of his colleagues in the
antiwar movement who thought he shared their anti-authority
sentiment, sharpened by Vietnam and Watergate.
"A lot of liberal Democrats in Massachusetts thought, What
is this about?" said Ron Rosenblith, who met Mr. Kerry in
the antiwar movement and has worked for him over the years
as an aide, campaign manager and consultant. "They didn't
see it as consistent."
Of course, it is just some of these aspects of Mr. Kerry -
hunter, prosecutor, deficit hawk, war veteran - which now
give him an answer to suggestions that he is nothing more
than a "Massachusetts liberal" in the mold of Michael S.
Dukakis, whom he served as lieutenant governor.
"He doesn't fit into any neat pigeon holes," said Mr.
Kerry's younger brother, Cameron, his closest adviser.
"He's complex. So what?"
Those who have known him a long time say Mr. Kerry is a
creature of the gray areas in politics and policy, asking
endless questions about all the angles, playing the devil's
advocate until his aides are exhausted, arguing as if with
himself until the last possible minute.
"There's indoor John and outdoor John," said Jonathan
Winer, a Washington lawyer and former State Department
official who worked for Mr. Kerry from 1983 to 1994.
"Indoor John is thoughtful, works all this through, is
nuanced, and so deeply into the process that you can get
impatient," Mr. Winer said. "Outdoor John is a man of
action. There'd be a point where, Boom! and go. Once it
happened, the dialogue was over, and you wouldn't always
know which way he was going to go."
Mr. Kerry's explanations for a number of the recent stances
Republicans are branding as flip-flops have a common
thread. He voted for the Iraq resolution but criticizes the
war because, he says, the president "broke his promises" to
exhaust the diplomatic process and use force only as a last
resort. He voted for the education legislation known as the
No Child Left Behind law but lambastes President Bush now
because, Mr. Kerry says, he withheld promised additional
money for education.
And on Friday, he said he had criticized the Israeli wall
before the Arab-American group in October because its path
was then expected to deviate widely from Israel's border
into West Bank villages - though he conceded he had not
made the distinction clear at the time.
Mr. Kerry also voted for the antiterrorism law known as the
USA Patriot Act, which he has since all but repudiated,
telling Democratic audiences that the best thing Congress
put into that law was a sunset clause that will make it
expire next year, unless Congress renews it. He has likened
the law's use against Americans to the repression of
Afghans by the Taliban.
But he also says the law was necessary when it was passed,
as a response to the Sept. 11 attacks. And as recently as
last week, he went further, telling a group of newspaper
editors and reporters, "Of course I support it," before
adding that his objections were mainly to the way Attorney
General John Ashcroft had been "abusing" it.
People who have worked closely with him in the Senate say
that Mr. Kerry tends to split differences. A longtime
friend and aide put it this way: "On some major issues
there are yes-but votes and no-but votes. He sees a lot of
them as yes-but."
A "yes-but" can also be revisited. Mr. Kerry's critics have
cited his position on the death penalty as evidence that
even his core convictions can be bent to his political
ambition. He was a longtime opponent of capital punishment
but came out in favor of an exception for terrorists after
the Sept. 11 attacks.
Mr. Rosenblith said Mr. Kerry had been thinking about the
issue for years. He recalled that Mr. Kerry had terrorists
on his mind when the subject arose in his re-election
campaign against Gov. William F. Weld in 1996. "Even in
'96, he thought that was a close call," Mr. Rosenblith
said, remembering an elaborate discussion of the issue. He
said Mr. Kerry decided against a death penalty for
terrorists at that time because he thought it would keep
other countries from extraditing terrorism suspects to the
United States.
Indeed, Mr. Kerry said in a debate that Mr. Weld's support
for the death penalty "would amount to a
terrorist-protection policy."
What changed Mr. Kerry's mind, Mr. Rosenblith said, was
that after Sept. 11, 2001, "other countries are far less
likely to say, `No, we're not going to turn over this
person to you.' "
"The world looks at terrorism very differently," Mr.
Rosenblith said.
Mr. Winer, the former aide, who worked with Mr. Kerry on
terrorism and many other issues, described Mr. Kerry's
complexity as right for the times.
"Between the moral clarity, black and white, good and evil
of George Bush that distorts and gets reality wrong," he
said, "and someone who quotes a French philosopher, André
Gide, saying, `Don't try to understand me too much,' I'd
let Americans decide which in the end is closer to what
they need in a president, in a complex world where if you
get it really wrong there are enormous consequences."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/06/politics/campaign/06KERR.html?ex=1079579344&ei=1&en=38de3bf0d9bff04b
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
