kausfiles A mostly political Weblog. - Senator Kerry takes a stand on Cuba: From a news report in today's Miami Herald ...
''I'm pretty tough on Castro, because I think he's running one of the last vestiges of a Stalinist secret police government in the world,'' Kerry told WPLG-ABC 10 reporter Michael Putney in an interview to be aired at 11:30 this morning.
Then, reaching back eight years to one of the more significant efforts to toughen sanctions on the communist island, Kerry volunteered: ``And I voted for the Helms-Burton legislation to be tough on companies that deal with him.''
It seemed the correct answer in a year in which Democratic strategists think they can make a play for at least a portion of the important Cuban-American vote -- as they did in 1996 when more than three in 10 backed President Clinton's reelection after he signed the sanctions measure written by Sen. Jesse Helms and Rep. Dan Burton.
There is only one problem: Kerry voted against it.
Asked Friday to explain the discrepancy, Kerry aides said the senator cast one of the 22 nays that day in 1996 because he disagreed with some of the final technical aspects. But, said spokesman David Wade, Kerry supported the legislation in its purer form -- and voted for it months earlier. ...
But there are also constant reminders that Kerry struggles with the complexities of Cuba. Asked in the Herald interview last year about sending Elián back to Cuba, Kerry was blunt: ``I didn't agree with that.''
But when he was asked to elaborate, Kerry acknowledged that he agreed the boy should have been with his father.
So what didn't he agree with?
''I didn't like the way they did it. I thought the process was butchered,'' he said.
The Kerry campaign philosophy isn't "Bring it on!" so much as "That'll snow 'em!" But it won't! ... P.S.: Those are not really flip-flops, but rather half-disclosed straddles--presenting one face of a strategically ambiguous position to a target audience and hoping they won't notice the other, contradictory face. Straddles seem to be Kerry's specialty. An actual flip flop would be, say, criticizing the overall Cuba embargo in 2000 and supporting it in 2003. ... Of course, Kerry did that too. .... |
