[Marxism] Doing his duty as an imperialist politician, Kerry hands Bush a campaign victory

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

POLITICAL MEMO
Bush's Mocking Drowns Out Kerry's Explanation of Iraq Vote
By DAVID E. SANGER

Published: August 12, 2004




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   Bush, George W




 Kerry, John F




 Presidential Elections (US)
Whether this will save Bush's family jewels is an open question -- it
doesn't eliminate the problems Washington is facing in Iraq, which
threaten to force the actual war, not the prospective war to the center
of the stage again nor does it abolish US economic vulnerability -- but
it has clearly placed the president in a stronger position.

But Kerry, who has made support for the war as an ongoing reality an
axis of his campaign and has thus forced antiwar ABBers to collaborate
in pushing the issue off the agenda (a big gain for the warmakers), is
clearly determined to be a good soldier on this one -- in part to
instill the rulers with confidence that he can be relied on as the
Commander in Chief of the only true world empire.

>From a purely electoral standpoint, Bush might be advised to stay away
from the so-called "October Surprises" which can blow up in his face
(such as the current offensive in Iraq which is again highlighting
weaknesses in the US position there) and to count on Kerry to spin
himself gradually deeper into this hole.  It will help Bush if there are
no big foreign policy explosions (such as the one Washington provoked by
again taking on Al-Sadr) before November. But of course Bush, like
Kerry, has to do his duty by the billionaires as well as run for office.
Fred Feldman



WASHINGTON, Aug. 11 - For five days now, as the long-distance arguments
between President Bush and Senator John Kerry have focused on the wisdom
of invading Iraq, Mr. Kerry has struggled to convince his audiences that
his vote to authorize the president to use military force was a far, far
cry from voting for a declaration of war.

So far, his aides and advisers concede, he has failed to get his message
across, as Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have mocked his
efforts as "a new nuance" that amount to more examples of the senator's
waffling.

Mr. Kerry's problems began last week when President Bush challenged him
for a yes-or-no answer on a critical campaign issue: If Mr. Kerry knew
more than a year ago what he knows today about the failure to find
weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, would he still have voted to
authorize the use of military force to oust Saddam Hussein?

As Mr. Bush surely knew, it is a question that can upset the difficult
balance Mr. Kerry must strike. He has to portray himself as tough and
competent enough to be commander in chief, yet appeal to the faction of
Democrats that hates the war and eggs him on to call Mr. Bush a liar.

It is a problem that has dogged Mr. Kerry since he walked through the
snows of Iowa and New Hampshire, and suffered the barbs of Vermont's
former governor, Howard Dean, who made Mr. Kerry's vote to authorize
action an issue. Now Mr. Bush has taken up where Dr. Dean left off.

"Kerry has always had this vulnerability of looking flip-floppy on the
issue and Bush is using this very shrewdly," said Walter Russell Mead, a
scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations. He added "Being silent on
the question makes him look evasive, and saying something, anything,
gets him in trouble with one side of his party or another."

Mr. Kerry's friends concede the first rounds have gone to the president
- "it's frustrating as hell," Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware
said on Wednesday - but Mr. Bush has his own problems, since the
argument re-ignites the question of whether he rushed to war without a
plan about what to do next.

It is an issue on which Mr. Bush can still sound defensive. On Wednesday
in Albuquerque, he responded to Mr. Kerry's suggestion that the United
States could begin pulling troops out of Iraq next year by saying, "I
know what I'm doing when it comes to winning this war, and I'm not going
to be sending mixed signals" by discussing pullouts.

Mr. Bush also reaffirmed his stance on the war when he challenged Mr.
Kerry. "We did the right thing,'' the president said on Friday, "and the
world is better off for it."

Across the weekend, the Kerry campaign debated how Mr. Kerry should
respond. "There were a lot of ideas," said one official, "from silence,
to throwing the question back in the president's face."

But the decision, in the end, was Mr. Kerry's. He chose to take the bait
on Monday at the edge of the Grand Canyon. Asked by a reporter, he said
he would have voted for the resolution - even in the absence of evidence
of weapons of mass destruction - before adding his usual explanation
that he would have subsequently handled everything leading up to the war
differently.

Mr. Bush, sensing he had ensnared Mr. Kerry, stuck in the knife on
Tuesday, telling a rally in Panama City, Fla., that "he now agrees it
was the right decision to go into Iraq." The Kerry camp says that
interpretation of Mr. Kerry's words completely distorted the difference
between a vote to authorize war and a decision to commit troops to the
battlefield.

Mr. Kerry's answer is being second-guessed among his supporters, some of
whom argued that he should have been more wary of the trap.

"I wish he had simply said no president in his right mind would ask the
Senate to go to war against a country that didn't have weapons that pose
an imminent threat," said one of Mr. Kerry's Congressional colleagues
and occasional advisers.

Senator Biden argued that Mr. Kerry is being "asked to explain Bush's
failure through his own vote. I saw a headline that said 'Kerry Would
Have Gone to War.' That's bull. He wouldn't have. Not the way Bush did.
But that wasn't the choice at the time - the choice was looking for a
way to hold Saddam accountable."




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