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Politics : Don't Blame Me, I Voted For Kerry -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Selectric II who wrote (584)	2/3/2004 11:48:48 AM
From: JakeStraw	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 81568

Kerry's Senate record may be a liability Now that his opponents are moving even more aggressively to slow Kerry's rise, his 19-year voting record as the junior senator from Massachusetts could loom as his greatest political vulnerability, to Democrats and Republicans alike. The sheer length of Kerry's service means that he has built a paper trail of positions on education, the military, intelligence and other issues -- stands that might have looked one way when he took them but that resonate differently now. For example, at the end of the Cold War, Kerry advocated scaling back the CIA, but after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, he complained about a lack of intelligence capability. In the 1980s, he opposed the death penalty for terrorists who killed Americans abroad, but he now supports the death penalty for terrorist acts. In the 1990s, he joined with Republican senators to sponsor proposals to end tenure for public school teachers and allow direct grants to religion-based charities, measures that many Democratic groups opposed. In 1997, he voted to require elderly people with higher incomes to pay a larger share of Medicare premiums. The record is susceptible to two broad strands of attack. Kerry's rival Democrats point to a series of shifting stands on issues, like his qualified praise for the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress and his vote authorizing President Bush to use force in Iraq. They say these are at odds with his claim to be the "real deal" Democratic alternative to Bush, capable of "standing up for people and taking on powerful interests," as he says in his stump speech. "When it was popular to be a Massachusetts liberal, his voting record was that," said Jay Carson, a Dean campaign spokesman. "When it was popular to be for the Iraq war, he was for it. Now it's popular to be against it, and he's against it. This is a voting record that is a big vulnerability against Republicans in the general election. He's all over the place on this stuff." sltrib.com