The last time I posted negative comments about John Kerry the reaction was decidedly mixed. That was back in September when I took issue with John kerry’s championing of “count every vote” on his web site after having failed to fulfill a campaign pledge to demand that very thing before conceding the 2004 presidential election.
I know Kerry has his loyal fans who sometimes bristle when he is criticized by fellow Democrats and progressives, but I feel compelled once again to risk the ire of the Kerry-faithful.
Last Wednesday, November 16th, Wolf Blitzer at CNN aired a lengthy interview with Kerry. In that interview Kerry stopped just short of declaring his candidacy for the 2008 Presidency:
Would I like to be president? Yes, obviously. I ran for the job. I think I would have made a good president for America, a strong president. I would have had us in a very different place than we are today.
“…I’m not running yet… I’ll tell you this: …If I get in that race, having learned what I’ve learned, and the experience I had last year, I think I know how to do what I need to do and I will run to win…
Blitzer asked about 2004 Kerry running-mate John Edwards’ recent declaration that he had make a “mistake” in voting in to empower George W. Bush to take us to war in Iraq. “I said that before Senator Edwards wrote that” responded Kerry, adding “I would not have voted for that resolution given what we know today.”
Kerry: I think anybody worth their salt ought to see the mistakes and incompetence of this administration. How could you possibly say you’re going to vote that you’ll have this incompetent administration go out and be incompetent again? Of course I wouldn’t do that. But we didn’t know that at the time.
Many had reached that same conclusion by last Summer, but back on August 8, 2004 then-candidate John Kerry, speaking to reporters in Grand Canyon National Park, provided a a glaringly different response to a very similar question:
Kerry stands by ‘yes’ vote on Iraq war
Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry said Monday he would not have changed his vote to authorize the war against Iraq, but said he would have handled things “very differently” from President Bush.
…The U.S. senator from Massachusetts said the congressional resolution gave Bush “the right authority for the president to have.”
So just exactly what has occured in the intervening months to change John Kerry’s mind? Certainly by August 8, 2004 we knew quite a lot about the “mistakes and incompetence” of the Bush administration? By then we knew there were no WMD, that Iraq had not been involved in 9/11, and that Saddam had not been in league with Al Qaeda in supporting a world-wide terror campaign, despite efforts by the Bush administration to convinvce us otherwise during the lead-up to war. “The president of the United States went before the Congress and used information that the White House had been told three times, verbally and in writing, did not happen,” Kerry told Blitzer last Wednesday. “The president and vice president both, in their speeches, linked Saddam Hussein and Iraq to terrorism and to the war on terror, and put it into the whole basket of 9/11.”
Cynic that I am, I can’t help but wonder if it has more to do with the polls than it has to do with Kerry’s true convictions. Back when Kerry voted for the war. George W. Bush enjoyed a 67% approval rating. When he told reporters he stood by his 2002 vote, a small majority of Americans still thought we had been right to invade Iraq. That certainly has changed.
According to the CNN/USA Today poll, here is how the public responded to the question: “All in all, do you think it was worth going to war in Iraq, or not?”
Worth Going to War:
7/8-11, 2004: 47%
11/11-13, 2005: 38%
Not Worth It:
7/8-11, 2004: 50%
11/11-13, 2005: 60%
I am delighted that John Kerry has come to regret his October 2002 vote that helped the Bush administration take us to war. I only wish he had done that during the presidential campaign when it might have made a difference.
