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Friday, July 30, 2004
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SPEECHIFYING, AND THOUGHTS ON JOHN KERRY, VIETNAM AND IRAQ
Earlier this week I calculated the Electoral College based on my projections of which states would be won by each campaign. According to those calculations, I projected Senator John Kerry to win the presidency by a bare 272 electoral votes. No one was more surprised by this than I was.
While I'm pretty confident about my projections, I'm only really uncomfortable about 3 or 4 states, I still can't believe it. Every instinct in my body tells me that Kerry is going to lose. John Kerry is quite simply the worst candidate I've ever seen. Should he win, it won't be attributed to any grand strategy of his. The president will blow it.
Senator Kerry has done very little to disprove my assertions. If anything, his acceptence speech last night only reaffirmed them.
It wasn't a bad speech. It was acceptable, if overly long. Unfortunately, Kerry needed much more than an acceptable speech. He needed a blockbuster and he didn't deliver. The senator committed perhaps the worst crime in either politics or show business, he was overshadowed by the undercard. President Clinton, Barack Obama and Senator Edwards all outshined Kerry. Even Al Gore delivered a better speech. Having Kerry follow those speakers was like having the Rolling Stones open for a high school garage band.
Much is made of how Kerry's background makes him better suited for the presidency than George Bush. His foreign policy advisor, former UN ambassador Richard Holbrooke, has said that Kerry is a born internationalist. His father was a diplomat and he grew up in a divided Berlin. Well, I went to Disney Land in 1978. That didn't make me a Mouseketeer. I was in relationship that required me to commute to California for five years. This did not lead to an invitation to join the Beach Boys.
Furthermore, Kerry's speech could lead people to conclude that he hasn't done anything since 1971. He mentions his career as Boston prosecutor only in passing. His 20 years in the Senate was barely mentioned at all (A grand total of 26 seconds of a 55 minute speech to be precise.) Virtually everything in his life seems to revolve around Vietnam.
The strategy of emphasizing Vietnam is fraught with peirl. Firstly, what John Kerry doesn't tell you is how long he spent there. All of four months. While I do no doubt his considerable bravery and record of service, I have serious doubts about the wisdom of centering a campaign around it.
Firstly, it's unbecoming. Several war heroes have run for president. John McCain rarely brought up his five years of captivity in Hanoi. Granted, his first book dealt with it, but largely within the context of his family's record of service. People knew about McCain's bravery.
Bob Dole was a certified war hero. As a young officer in Italy, he went out, under fire to save a wounded enlisted man. His right arm was nearly shot off and his neck was broken. He spent nearly three years in an Army hospital in Grand Rapids, Michigan recovering from those wounds. When he returned to Kansas, he put himself through law school without being able to take notes. Bob Dole almost never mentioned this fact in his many campaigns.
President George H. W Bush was the youngest pilot in the Pacific theater in World War II. He was shot down near an island, Kiki Jima, that was in the hands of a Japanese officer who was later hung (or hanged, as the Maximum Leader has pointed out) as a war criminal. 19 other Americans were taken prisoner on that island. All were killed, and in some of the cases, cannabalized. It wasn't until after he left office that the first President Bush talked at length about the experience.
It's also worth noting that both President Bush and Senator Dole were both defeated by wide margins by Bill Clinton, who actively avoided service.
Senator Kerry's reliance on Vietnam also brings to mind the complicated relationship that he, and the Democratic Party as a whole, had with Vietnam. When President Kennedy assumed office, there were 700 American soldiers in Vietnam. When he was murdered in Dallas, two and a half years later, there were 16,000. In his first year as president, Lyndon Johnson submitted the Gulf of Tonkin resolution to Congress as a means of expanding his war powers. Every single Democrat in the senate voted for the resolution. The only dissenting vote came from Wayne Morse, then a Republican from Oregon.
When, in March of 1968, President Johnson announced that he would not seek a second term, there were 568,000 troops in Vietnam. It was only after President Nixon took office that Democratic opinion solidified against the war. In 1973 the Democratic Congress passed the wildly unconstitutional War Powers Act over Nixon's veto. This was done mostly as a means of expressing their displeasure with Nixon's Vietnam policy.
In April of 1975, the Democratic Congress cut off all military assistence to South Vietnam that was assured under the Paris Peace Accords. The Democratic party essentially abandoned an ally on whose behalf they initiated a war. There is a very good reason that they haven't campaigned on Vietnam for the last 32 years. Kerry has decided to reverse that trend.
However, Senator Kerry himself has a problematic history in regards to the war. While I don't question the distinction of his service, his conduct upon his return raises some important questions. Kerry returned to America and joined Veterans Against the War (which he later resigned from when it became public knowledge that VAW was controlled by Hanoi.) In testimony before the Fulbright Commitee, he asserted that American forces in Vietnam were comitting war crimes. In a 1971 appearence on Meet The Press, he said that he himself had committed "attrocities" - his word, not mine.
Senator Kerry has attempted to dismiss those early quotes by saying that they were the thoughts of "an angry young man." It should be noted that John Kerry was 27 years old at the time. Kerry's voluntary service in Vietnam and his willingness to exploit it politically is a virtual invitation to the Republicans to note his opposition to the war and the inflammatory statements he made regarding it upon his return.
The nominee's changing positions on Vietnam dovetail rather nicely with his many stands on the Iraq war. The Senator prefers not to admit this now, but you would have been hard pressed to find a more vocal supporter of President Bush's war amoung Senate Democrats when the use of force resolution was voted on in the Senate. It was only after Howard Dean's anti-war candidacy picked up significant support that Kerry became a critic of the policy.
It is also noteworthy that Senator Kerry voted against the first President Bush's authority to make war on Iraq, despite the fact that it had forces actually occupying another country, and that Bush 41 had a coalition that included the very nations Kerry now seeks support from.
When his campaign was moribound in Iowa, Kerry voted against the 87 billion dollar war supplemental bill that the president had submitted. He cast this vote even after he told Face the Nation that such a vote would be "irresponsible."
To this very day, Senator Kerry refuses to say that he supports or opposes the war in Iraq. He merely says that he would conduct it differently. He has suggested, against all available evidence, that the UN and NATO would have joined the United States in the war. In fact, President Bush did introduce a resolution to the United Nations Security Council, which was later withdrawn in the face of a certain French veto.
John Kerry would have you believe that a nation will commit its blood and treasure to the invasion of another nation if they are asked nicely enough by a third nation. France, Germany and the Russian Federation clearly demonstrated the reverse. Countries only go to war when it is in their national interest to do so. To imply that these countries will commit their forces to clean up what they percieve as an American mess is either incredibly niave or unbelievably cynical.
In his speech last night, Senator Kerry promised a number of things. These include health care coverage for those not covered, more federal aid to education, and increased spending for intelligence and the military. How does he propose to pay for all of this? He says that he will not raise taxes. In fact, he promised a middle class tax cut. He proposes that all of his promises could be paid for by recinding the upper end of Bush's tax cut alone. This works out to be about $90 billion. While that sounds like a lot of money, it isn't enough to fund even one of Kerry's pledges.
On top of all of this, Kerry also promises to eliminate the deficit.
While President Bush is hardly the model of fiscal responsibility, Senator Kerry is attempting to challenge him on who can be more out of control when it comes to federal spending. Should he be challenged on his numbers, he has basically two defences; dishonesty or stupidity.
Senator Kerry did make at least one honest statement last night, this is the most important election since the end of the Second World War. What's unfortunate is that neither candidate deserves to win it.
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