Kerry, Nowhere to Run or Hide
by J. B. Williams
Tuesday, September 07, 2004
''Accelerating free fall'' pretty well describes the current presidential campaign status of Democratic candidate John Kerry's 2004 bid for the White House. Having been spanked like the
red-headed stepchild of Saddam Hussein for weeks now, by everyone from his fellow Vietnam Vets and POWs, to his fellow Democrat Senator Zell Miller, Kerry sends out a distress signal and calls the Clinton cavalry in an attempt to save his sinking ship.
Bill Clinton, from his hospital bed awaiting open heart surgery, gives the beleaguered candidate his best professional campaign advice, ''Stop talking about Vietnam,'' advice that would have been more useful before the DNC convention.
Former President Clinton advised Kerry to begin talking about jobs, the economy, and health care, and to shift the focus off of what he did or didn’t do in Vietnam 35 years ago. Stree what needs to be done in the next four years. Seems like sound advice to me, if it were any other candidate besides John Kerry, that is.
John Kerry's biggest problem is that he's got nowhere to run, and nothing to run on!
What started out as 254 fellow vets with an ax to grind, has become a full scale Navy investigation into Kerry’s medals, and it isn’t going away. Trying to shift the focus off this story is a great idea, though probably not possible at this stage.
In order to shift the focus, there has to be something to shift the focus to, and that in itself presents a bit of a problem for candidate Kerry. Shift the focus to what? \Jobs?
Bush is running a 5.4% unemployment rate at present, which has steadily dropped for the last 14 months and is now below the Clinton 5.5% unemployment rate when he was running for re-election in 1996. In addition, small business start-ups and job opportunities have
skyrocketed during the last four years, and these numbers are not reflected in the standard employment figures at all, making the picture even brighter than reported.
Can Kerry shift to the economy? Maybe, but it's pretty hard to sell in a time when America is experiencing the best economic expansion numbers in more than 30 years, with home ownership at an all-time high, and interest rates near an all-time low.
He can’t shift the debate to the war on terrorism, or national security, because both are are clear winners for Bush and Co., and John Kerry and his running mate have two of the worst voting records on both, which is why they chose to run on his four months in Vietnam to begin with.
That leaves the topic of heath care. This too is a problem for Kerry, having been in the Senate for 20 years without having made a single effort to address the issue. Being a member of the party responsible for destroying health care in America with the invention of the HMO, not to mention the party's support of ambulance chasing and liberal judges that have lead to the sky rocketing heath care costs, won’t help either.
What's left to run on? John Kerry's only hope of getting back in this race is to successfully demonize his opponents.
So, they return to the old tricks of attacking Bush’s service as a so-called ''champagne soldier'' in the National Guard, which of course discredits all those ''champagne soldiers'' now dying on the battlefield in a National Guard uniform.
They will bring back the ''Bush was AWOL in Alabama'' charge. But the problem here is that nobody besides Terry McAuliffe has ever made such a charge. Unlike Kerry's situation, there are no 254 fellow service men that came forward to make the charge, or even one, then or now. Just one crusty old DNC warhorse without a viable candidate of his own.
They will beat the Halliburton/Cheney drum some more, but it's hard to make a case that anyone is getting rich from a government contract when the government is late in paying the contract. It's even harder to prove any impropriety when Halliburton is the world leader in its industry, with lots of experience in such missions, and the only one with the financial stability to do the work required while waiting to get paid.
They will continue to accuse Bush of running negative attack ads, but so far, Bush has not run any. They will continue to suggest that the Swift Vets are a Bush front, but they aren’t, and Bush has no real control over them, or any other 527.
They will bring out the ''Bush Lied'' hammer. But most people are now aware that Kerry and Edwards, along with the Clinton administration, 75% of Congress and most of the free world made the exact same case for removing Hussein from power, and the bi-partisan 9/11 Commission concluded that all of them were right.
It appears to me that John Kerry's 15 minutes may have already come and gone. I’m no campaign expert, but I don’t see anywhere else for Kerry to run, or even hide.
Even the old ''right wing conspiracy'' thing won't fly, as if it really ever did.
The RNC Convention showcased Republican Party moderates. However, none of their messages were the least bit moderate, proving that if there is indeed a conspiracy under way. It isn’t coming from the right wing extremists, but rather from the Party centrists--moderates who pulled no punches calling Kerry unfit for the office of commander in chief--not on the basis of what he did 35 years ago, or said 30 years ago, but on the basis of what he has done, or not done, since.
It’s not over until it's over, but I can sure hear the fat lady warming up.
Kerry has a problem, and not one he can solve by firing campaign staff, or hiring Clinton hatchet men. His problem is that he has no campaign and he never did.
Trying to invent a campaign where one doesn’t exist has proven not only to be difficult, but costly--both in terms of record soft money spending, and in terms of personal credibility.
In the end, Kerry will have only accomplished the same thing Al Gore did in 2000, making Clinton look good! |
