Pat Allen: The View from Right Field

John Kerry and Afghanistan

While everybody’s focus was on Egypt last week, a fascinating little dance was going on between Senator John Kerry and the Administration regarding Afghanistan. 

First, Senator Kerry called up Boston University professor Andrew Bacevich, a noted opponent of both the war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan and asked him to have lunch.  At some point after the lunch, somebody, Senator Kerry, perhaps, called the Boston Globe to tell them about the lunch and to say that Senator Kerry, in the words of the Globe, “has concluded that the US strategy in Afghanistan has to be revised” and that he “is calling for a more limited focus and fewer troops than the 155,000 that are in place now.”

The article in the Globe continues:

“‘What I don’t want is to be party to a policy that continues simply because it is there and in place,’ Kerry said in an interview about his evolving views of the war in Afghanistan. ‘That would be like Vietnam. And that is what I am determined to try to prevent.’”

Given that Senator Kerry is chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations committee, this is big news – and not good news for President Obama.  Except that, by the time I saw the article, it included this “clarification” at the very beginning of the story:

“A headline on an earlier version of this story may have left the false impression that Senator John F. Kerry has called for a significant reduction in US military forces in Afghanistan. He has not. While the senator told the Globe that troop levels should be reduced by an unspecified amount, with greater emphasis on counterterrorism, he characterized that as a ‘tweak’ of current strategy. The story failed to mention Kerry's description of his position as a ‘tweak.’ A Kerry spokesman also disputed the story's portrayal of his meeting with Boston University professor Andrew J. Bacevich, a war opponent, as evidence of the senator's growing doubts about the war. The spokesman said Kerry regularly speaks with people of varying views on the war and that the Bacevich meeting had no larger meaning.”

Two comments.  First, it appears that the Administration was not happy with the article and that, even with everything else that was happening around the world, somebody found the time to both read the article and let Senator Kerry know about their feelings. Certainly, after reading the “clarification,” there wasn’t much of the article left, at least insofar as it related to Senator Kerry.

Second, in reading the article, you get the feeling the Senator Kerry really wants to oppose the war in Afghanistan.  He first achieved fame (notoriety-?) by opposing the war in Vietnam.  You get the feeling he would love to oppose this war, too.  Then every time he spoke against the war in Afghanistan, the (mainstream) media would recall how he spoke against the Vietnam War.  It would be great.

But Barack Obama won in 2008, not John McCain, so John Kerry is stuck supporting, grudgingly, a war that it seems like he would really be happier opposing.

John Kerry Does It Again

It probably seems unnecessary for yet another comment on John Kerry’s "botched joke," but here are my thoughts:

1. When I first read what he said, I did not think that Senator Kerry was really criticizing our soldiers in Iraq – even though that was what he said (and that was what he did in his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971, when he said that US soldiers in Vietnam were committing war crimes). I assumed it was just another lame Democratic attempt to make a joke about how stupid President Bush is. Bush’s stupidity is a given among Democrats and a source, I guess, of great humor among them. I assumed that was what Kerry was doing (and failing at). It is one of the problems with telling "in" jokes to people who are not in on them. They can be misunderstood, especially if they are done without a full explanation.

2. What was interesting, however, was how long it took Kerry to finally apologize. In the last week before a critical election, Kerry used up two full days being the big story – and he was not even running. I knew Kerry was in trouble when I heard Dick Durbin call for an apology. If Dick Durbin will not back a Democrat, you know he or she is in trouble.

3. I would like to include three things here. The first is Kerry’s now infamous botched joke: "You know, education--if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, uh, you can do well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq."

Next is the first statement Kerry issued (on October 31) in response to attacks on what he said:

"Statement of John Kerry Responding to Republican Distortions, Pathetic Tony Snow Diversions and Distractions

Washington – Senator John Kerry issued the following statement in response to White House Press Secretary Tony Snow, assorted right wing nut-jobs, and right wing talk show hosts desperately distorting Kerry’s comments about President Bush to divert attention from their disastrous record:

‘If anyone thinks a veteran would criticize the more than 140,000 heroes serving in Iraq and not the president who got us stuck there, they're crazy. This is the classic G.O.P. playbook. I’m sick and tired of these despicable Republican attacks that always seem to come from those who never can be found to serve in war, but love to attack those who did.

I’m not going to be lectured by a stuffed suit White House mouthpiece standing behind a podium, or doughy Rush Limbaugh, who no doubt today will take a break from belittling Michael J. Fox’s Parkinson’s disease to start lying about me just as they have lied about Iraq. It disgusts me that these Republican hacks, who have never worn the uniform of our country lie and distort so blatantly and carelessly about those who have.

The people who owe our troops an apology are George W. Bush and Dick Cheney who misled America into war and have given us a Katrina foreign policy that has betrayed our ideals, killed and maimed our soldiers, and widened the terrorist threat instead of defeating it. These Republicans are afraid to debate veterans who live and breathe the concerns of our troops, not the empty slogans of an Administration that sent our brave troops to war without body armor.

Bottom line, these Republicans want to debate straw men because they’re afraid to debate real men. And this time it won’t work because we’re going to stay in their face with the truth and deny them even a sliver of light for their distortions. No Democrat will be bullied by an administration that has a cut and run policy in Afghanistan and a stand still and lose strategy in Iraq.’"

I assume this was prepared by some staffer with an over-active outrage gland, instead of Senator Kerry himself. However, it was issued in his name, so he has to live with it. It is interesting how many Democratic clichés they were able to squeeze into just five paragraphs.

This is the statement Kerry issued yesterday, when he finally got around to trying to apologize:

"Statement of Senator John Kerry

As a combat veteran, I want to make it clear to anyone in uniform and to their loved ones: my poorly stated joke at a rally was not about, and never intended to refer to any troop.

I sincerely regret that my words were misinterpreted to wrongly imply anything negative about those in uniform, and I personally apologize to any service member, family member, or American who was offended.

It is clear the Republican Party would rather talk about anything but their failed security policy. I don’t want my verbal slip to be a diversion from the real issues. I will continue to fight for a change of course to provide real security for our country, and a winning strategy for our troops."

Even in his apology Kerry does not really accept responsibility for what he said: he did not say anything wrong; it was just a poorly stated joke; he regrets any misinterpretation. Of course, you do not have to "interpret" Kerry’s words to get the insult to our soldiers. The insult is what the words said. You only have to "interpret" the words if you want to avoid insulting the troops.

It is interesting that, even when Kerry was trying to apologize, the longest paragraph was an attack on Republicans instead of his acceptance of responsibility. I think it gnaws at Kerry that he lost to somebody who is as stupid as Kerry apparently thinks Bush is.

Finally, I wonder how our troops in Iraq and their loved ones and friends back here will take this apology. Is it good enough? I have some doubts.

John Kerry Shows Us Again Why He Deserved to Lose

I was away for the Labor Day weekend and did not get a chance to comment on this before, but better late than never:

Last week it was reported that, in an e-mail John Kerry sent out supporting the Democratic candidate for governor in Ohio, Kerry claimed Ken Blackwell, the Republican candidate for governor of Ohio and current Ohio Secretary of State, "used the power of his state office to try to intimidate Ohioans and suppress the Democratic vote" in 2004.

Our democracy, any democracy, depends on honest elections and the people’s faith in honest elections. There have been instances where legitimate questions about election results have been raised. When this happens, they need to be answered. But just as important as addressing legitimate questions is not wrongly attacking the legitimacy of our election system for mere personal interest.

Personal ambition must not come before the best interests of our country. Richard Nixon understood that in 1960 when he told his supporters to halt efforts to challenge the results in Texas and Illinois. There were legitimate questions about the results in these states, but it was a dangerous time, and Nixon felt the United States could not afford the uncertainty of an election challenge. So he put personal ambition aside for the good of our country.

It appears John Kerry has decided this question differently. In bringing up these phony claims yet again (he did, after all, lose Ohio by more than Nixon lost the entire country), Senator Kerry is telling us he believes attacking the legitimacy of our electoral system is just another tactic he can use to gain chits for when he runs for President in 2008.

We all make choices, and these choices say a lot about us. Richard Nixon made his choice in 1960. John Kerry is making his today.

[Title revised: September 6, 2006]

At Least I Now Know Why the NY Times Supported John Kerry

I think I have figured out why The New York Times was such a big supporter of John Kerry in 2004 (and still is based on the totally uncritical front page article they published on May 28, 2006, about the efforts of a group of Kerry supporters to refute the claims of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth) and what they have in common.

As Jeff Jacoby noted in his column in the Boston Globe yesterday, less than two weeks after September 11, the Times said the following in an editorial:

"Washington and its allies must also disable the financial networks used by terrorists. The Bush administration is preparing new laws to help track terrorists through their money-laundering activity. ... Much more is needed, including ... greater cooperation with foreign banking authorities. There must also be closer coordination among America's law enforcement, national security, and financial regulatory agencies. … If America is going to wage a new kind of war against terrorism, it must act on all fronts, including the financial one."

Now, however, it appears the Times has switched sides, disclosing (and lessening the effectiveness of) the very kind of program they were telling Bush to implement in September of 2001.

Similarly, after Robert Novak identified Joe Wilson’s wife as a CIA "operative" in his now infamous column in July of 2003, the Times demanded the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate what they viewed as a breach of national security and violation of law. A couple of years later, when it finally dawned on the Times how the special prosecutor was going to try to find out who said what to whom and when (probably, about the time Judith Miller got Patrick Fitzgerald’s subpoena), the Times switched sides and began talking about freedom of the press and protecting journalists’ sources. In other words, when they saw a chance to get a conservative reporter, they were gung ho for an investigation. When they realized that they and their reporters were the logical people from whom the investigators would try to get information, their view changed.

As I said, now I realize why the Times supported Kerry and what John Kerry and the Times have in common: They were both for it before they were against it.

John Kerry and the Swift Boat Veterans / Getting Out the Vote: Two Questions on the 2004 Election

Two questions on the 2004 Presidential election:

1. Why didn't John Kerry just apologize for the things he said to the Senate Foreign Relations committee in 1971? It would not have taken much. Any kind of decent apology would have likely eliminated the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ("SBVT") as a factor in the election, and with them gone, the result might have been different.

2. The electoral vote did not change much from 2000 to 2004. Only three states switched, New Hampshire went from Bush to Kerry while Iowa and New Mexico went from Gore to Bush. So why did the popular vote change so much?

                                                                1.

In 1971, John Kerry, then 27 years old, appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and accused American soldiers in Vietnam of routinely committing war crimes. ("we had an investigation at which over 150 ... veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia"; "they told stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, ... randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan"; "we are more guilty than any other body of violations of those Geneva Conventions") Thirty years later, when John Kerry decided to run for President in 2004 and to make his service in Vietnam an important part of his campaign, he had to know somebody would try to use that testimony against him. Why did not he do something, before the campaign started or even in May of 2004 when the SBVT held their first press conference, to defuse the issue? While the SBVT raised several different issues against Kerry, if you listened to them, it was this testimony that really seemed to drive them. Their questions about Kerry's service in Vietnam or what he did with his medals after he got home, paled in comparison with his Senate testimony. To them, Kerry was, in that testimony, attacking their honor and the honor of their fellow soldiers. If Kerry could have dealt with the testimony issue, the questions of how he got his medals and what he did or did not do with them once he got home would have gone away. So why didn't Kerry try to do something?

The conventional wisdom is that Kerry thought that he could ignore the SBVT because the mainstream media ("MSM") would ignore them. It had happened that way before, in Kerry's races for other offices. And the MSM tried to do it again. When the SBVT first raised their questions in May, before the Democratic convention, the MSM ignored them. But 2004 was different from Kerry's earlier races in at least two ways. This time he was running for President, for Commander-in-Chief. This was just too much for the men who formed SBVT. When the MSM ignored them, they did not give up. They wrote Unfit for Command and produced their own commercials to tell their story.

Also, 2004 was different because the MSM no longer controlled the agenda. There was talk radio and FOX and even the blogs. These parts of the media did talk about the SBVT. It was not the MSM, but it was more than in the past.

Finally, the SBVT started to gain traction. Then, when Kerry attacked them in a press conference on August 19 and tried to get local TV stations to not carry their ads, the MSM could ignore them no longer. While most of the coverage in the MSM was negative, accusing SBVT of lying and inaccuracies and being a pawn for the Bush campaign, at least they were finally getting talked about.

But it is entirely possible that none of this would have happened if Kerry had just apologized early on. It should not have been that hard, and it might have worked, except for one thing: John Kerry could not do it.

It was those hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971 that first "made" John Kerry. Reading the exchanges between Kerry and the senators, one can see how it would be hard for him to disavow that. He was a celebrity at 27, a leader of his generation. There was no way John Kerry could apologize for that.

The problem this caused for Kerry was that the country changed between 1971 and 2004. Kerry was caught in a culture shift not unlike, in some ways, the one which engulfed Richard Nixon. What Nixon and/or his people did in that thing called "Watergate" was not all that different from what at least some of Nixon's predecessors had done. But by 1973, times had changed. What had previously been ignored and/or condoned was now an impeachable offense.

The same thing happened to John Kerry. In 1971 it was "hate the war, hate the soldier." If you were against the war, then you were against the soldiers, too. While there may not have been any soldiers who were literally spat on when they returned from Vietnam, many of them felt they were figuratively spat on by things such as John Kerry's Senate testimony. At some point, however, the country's mode changed. It may have been in 1984 when Ronald Reagan went to Normandy for the 40th anniversary of D-Day, and people starting talking about the Greatest Generation and the bands of brothers. No longer was it acceptable to "hate the war, hate the soldier." Now, even if you opposed the war, it was "hate the war, love the soldier." And Kerry, who could not apologize, was caught in that culture shift.

Kerry could not disavow his Senate testimony. The SBVT would not go away, and the MSM could no longer decide the election agenda. The result was a huge, maybe decisive, blow to the Kerry campaign.

                                                                     2.

The second question is how could the popular vote change so much in 2004 when there was such a small change in the Electoral College vote? The electoral vote in 2004 was almost as close as in 2000. As in 2000, the election came down to one state, this time Ohio, and Ohio was closer in 2004 than it was in 2000. However, the change in the popular vote was huge. Instead of losing by 500,000, Bush won by over 3,500,000. It was, in fact, this margin that made the election seem not so close.

Conventional wisdom says that the deepening divide between the red states and the blue states meant there were fewer close states, so there was never going to be much of a swing in the Electoral College. But I do not think that is the whole answer.

What is interesting about the 2004 election is that, while Bush’s margins in the so-called battleground states increased over 2000, in most cases they did not increase by that much. As Ruy Teixeira noted in "Why Bush Won" in Rolling Stone shortly after the election, "[o]nly a fifth of the increase in Bush's margin came from the battleground states, and about half of that increase came just from Florida." Where Bush really increased his vote was in the non-battleground states. But it was not just in the states he won. He also increased his vote in the states he lost. The Washington Times of August 21, 2005, quoted Michael Barone as saying, "The 2004 results showed the red states getting redder and the blue states getting less blue." Consider a few of the solid states: Alabama went from 56-42 for Bush in 2000 to 62-37 for Bush in 2004. Indiana went from 57-41 for Bush in 2000 to 60-39 four years later. Connecticut went from 56-38 Gore in 2000 to 54-44 Kerry in 2004. Similarly, New York went from 60-35 for Gore to 58-40 for Kerry.

The reason for this swing in the popular vote was, I believe, in how the two campaigns organized their get-out-the-vote efforts. As Michael Barone said (The Washington Times, August 21, 2005), the Democrats used "paid workers [paid either by the Kerry campaign itself or by "527" groups] persuading strangers to get out and vote." Because these people were being paid and because money was not unlimited (even for the "527" groups supporting Kerry), the Kerry campaign and its allies focused their efforts on the battleground states. They ignored the states Kerry was going to lose and the states he was going to win.

The Republican get-out-the-vote effort was different. Ken Mehlman set up a get-out-the-vote effort that relied on the Internet and volunteers. Mehlman used the Internet to identify, organize and motivate volunteers for the Bush get-out-the-vote effort.

While the Bush campaign obviously focused on the battleground states, once the Internet-based program was in place, it could be used everywhere. In effect, the Bush campaign was leveraging its get-out-the-vote effort by using the economies of scale of computer software; i.e., once the program is developed and the system is in place, extra users are basically free. In other words, once the get-out-the-vote program was set up for the battleground states, it could be expanded to, and used in, the non-battleground states at virtually no extra cost.

This meant that Bush had a volunteer effort in not just the battleground states but also in the red states and even the blue states. While Bush picked up more votes in the red states, extra votes in even the solid blue states gave Bush a bigger national margin in the popular vote. An article by David Von Drehle in The Washington Post of January 16, 2005, noted what this meant in the red states: "Bush was helped enormously ... by the fact that he ran virtually unopposed. Kerry spent nothing on advertising [or paid workers] in the Red Sea states; the unions and other groups that supported him put little or no effort in to spreading his message here." But, through his Internet-based, volunteer-driven get-out-the-vote effort, Ken Mehlman was able to get Bush’s message out in those states, and in doing so, Bush picked up the extra popular votes that wound up giving him a 3,500,000 margin. These extra votes in the red states and in the blue states did not matter in the Electoral College, but they were crucial in giving Bush a convincing win. At a program sponsored by The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life on November 17, 2004, E. J. Dionne said that his friends called him "because they know I never accepted that Bush won the last election, but even I have trouble overcoming a 3-million-vote margin this time."

When your main method of getting-out-the-vote is paid workers, you cannot do it nationally. However, when you are using volunteers, encouraged and coordinated by an Internet-based computer program, to get out the vote, you can do it everywhere. It may not make a difference in the states where your opponent is concentrating, but it will pick up popular votes in states where he is not doing anything and that can make your victory more convincing.

While it is doubtful that Kerry could have overcome Bush’s popular vote margin even if he had run a nationwide get-out-the-vote effort, he might cut Bush's margins in the solid states and made Bush’s victory seem much smaller. As it was, Ken Mehlman’s new style get-out-the-vote effort was a key to the size and convincing nature of President Bush’s reelection victory.