ABB'ers underwhelmed by Kerry "turn"

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Two of the highest profile Nader-bashers have weighed in on Kerry's 
speech at NYU, which has been heralded as the second coming of Howard 
Dean. Btw, don't mistake what they write as a signal that they will vote 
for anybody but Kerry. These are what you might call the extreme 
clothes-pin faction of the ABB brigade, as in putting a clothes-pin on 
your nose when you go into pull the lever for Kerry.

From Marc Cooper's blog:

Six weeks out from the election, finally, John Kerry moved aggressively 
toward defining his position on Iraq in a major address he gave today at 
NYU. He blasted the Bush administration for what he called its “colossal 
failures of judgement." That's obvious, isn't it?

Now, if only Kerry could delay the election until the beginning of the 
year, Kerry might actually get to where he should have been the whole 
time. Meanwhile, his indictment of the Bush policy was on target:

"The administration told us we’d be greeted as liberators. They were wrong.

"They told us not to worry about looting or the sorry state of Iraq's 
infrastructure. They were wrong.

(clip)

"In fact, the only officials who lost their jobs over Iraq were the ones 
who told the truth."

The problem is that Kerry’s recipe for how to move forward – by 
involving international support—is not going to happen. Not unless a 
President Kerry takes the one step he so far isn’t willing to go i.e. 
make it clear that the way forward is the way out.

full: http://marccooper.com/

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From Doug Ireland's blog:

September 21, 2004
THE FATAL NEW DECISIONS OF KERRY'S CAMPAIGN

One after the other, John Kerry's misdirected campaign is making 
decisions incomprehensible to most political operatives close to the 
ground and to the voters. First came the news that, as far as I'm 
concerned, Vernon Jordan had his pants taken down in the negotiations 
over the presidential debates by that sly old fox Jim Baker.

In this battle of the master-fixers from the back rooms of power, Baker 
somehow sweet-talked Jordan into accepting a change of topics for the 
first Kerry-Bush debate. It was to have been on domestic policy--the 
area in which, the polls all show, Bush's leadership is seen as the 
weaker of the two.

Instead, Jordan agreed that the first debate should be on foreign 
policy--but, in every category under this rubrique, whether it be 
terrorism, managing Iraq, national security, or leading the country in a 
crisis, this is the arena in which all the polls say Bush has a distinct 
(in some of them, overwhelming) advantage. The first debate is usually 
the one most watched by the electorate, and the one leaving the 
strongest impression of the candidates that it is subsequently difficult 
to shake or change. Kerry, of course, is seriously hobbled in these 
debates by his vote for war in Iraq--which is why all his pirouettes on 
the issue this year have been so ineffective and content-weak. Score 
Jordan's mistake for Bush.

Then, on Tuesday morning came Kerry's much-heralded speech on Iraq. The 
telepromptered text was crisper than Kerry's usual meanderings, but just 
as devoid of new and convincing substance. It would, we were told by his 
campaign's pre-spinners, lay out a detailed plan for how to get the U.S. 
out of Iraq. Well, Kerry's NYU speech did nothing of the sort. It was 
the same-old-same-old, airbrushed with a bit more vigorous rhetoric and 
given numerals so that Kerry supporters could talk about his "4-point 
plan."

One of the cleverer GOP consultants, Mike Murphy, devastatingly skewered 
these pretentions when he characterized the "Kerry plan" on Tuesday's 
Nightline as "Bush is a liar and I can be nice to the French." Kerry's 
assertion in the speech that he can somehow persuade foreign leaders to 
send their troops and personnel into the chaos that is Iraq to pay for 
America's imperial mistakes with their blood, and relieve the burden on 
the treasury of the World's Only Superpower--the poor, impoverished 
thing-- is a fantasy unlikely to convince anyone outside Kerry's circle 
of sycophants. And Kerry himself acknowledged that it would be four long 
years before the U.S. could withdraw from Iraq under his so-called "plan."

I found it incredible that, only 43 days before Election Day, Kerry was 
still engaging in pompous, first person claims about his better skills 
than Bush on the Iraq issue--which up to now, let's be frank, have left 
the voters confused--instead of talking about the economy. Kerry, who 
won't admit a mistake, kept insisting, too, that he'd been right all 
along and had had a better plan than Bush all along. But, we learned 
from this week's Newsweek report, the latest batch of 
lobbyist-consultants imported to the Kerry campaign to save it from its 
blunders are responsible for pushing Kerry into refocussing his campaign 
on Iraq, making it the central theme on which he hopes to win the 
election. It is even, Newsweek reports, the theme of the final week of 
campaigning.

These millionaire media goniffs and Clintonista off-year whores for 
Corporate America, to whom Kerry is now listening, are themselves deaf 
to the wails of distress coming from those Democrats in the battleground 
states who have been begging for a bold Kerry economic attack on Bush, 
which they see as the only way of having a prayer of defeating this war 
president by mobilizing the victims of the Bush economy and energizing 
the desultory Democratic base. It's as if the Clintonista imports have 
forgotten their own mantra that brought them the White House: It's the 
economy, stupid--especially when Kerry has shown ever since he became 
the virtual nominee of his party that he cannot win on the Iraq issue.

full: http://direland.typepad.com/direland/

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