[A-List] US state: Kerry's shameless "centrism"

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

Kerry says he wants Republican McCain as defence secretary

Julian Borger in Washington
Thursday May 13, 2004
The Guardian

The Democratic presidential candidate, John Kerry, yesterday made a dramatic
bid for crossover votes, declaring that if elected, he would choose John
McCain, an outspoken Republican senator, as defence secretary.

Senator Kerry named another senior Republican, Senator John Warner,
currently chairing hearings into the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, as an
alternative.

Senator McCain is a personal friend of Senator Kerry, a fellow Vietnam
veteran, and the Kerry campaign has used a picture of the Democratic
candidate with his arm around Mr McCain in its TV advertisements. There has
even been talk of Mr McCain being picked as Mr Kerry's vice-presidential
candidate.

"I'm not the president today," Senator Kerry told a radio interviewer
yesterday, but added: "I have any number of people that I would make
secretary of defence, beginning with our good friend John McCain as an
example."

However, when asked about Mr Kerry's comments, Mr McCain said: "No thanks."

Mr McCain's aides have said recently that he plans to run for re-election as
a Republican senator, and he supports Mr Bush's re-election.

In the same interview yesterday, the Democratic candidate blamed the Bush
admin istration for the Abu Ghraib scandal. In the wake of the September 11
terrorist attacks, the administration had been dismissive in its attitude to
the Geneva Conventions, he said.

As a result, he argued, "the status of prisoners, both legal and moral,
becomes ambiguous at best".

Mr Kerry won the vocal support of his party's biggest star on Tuesday night,
when Bill Clinton urged Democrats to campaign for him and denounced
President George Bush for wasting international backing with the invasion of
Iraq.

"I think the world was really pulling for us after [the September 11]
attacks," the former president said at an economic forum in New York. But,
he said, the Bush administration "divided the world ... to pursue our
vision - not because of any imminent threat but because that's what they
wanted to do.

"There was a strong group of people in the administration who believed that
Saddam Hussein was more important than Osama bin Laden and believed that
dislodging him was important, without regard to whether he had weapons of
mass destruction."

Mr Clinton has not played a leading role in the Kerry campaign until now,
but both the Clinton and Kerry offices have explained his absence by his
obligation to finish his autobiography, due out next month.