Watching (still only a) Senator John Kerry’s Sunday morning
Meet the Press appearance, there seemed to be only one real
question remaining: How would the Boston Brahmin have fared in the
Iraqi election? After all, Kerry’s rhetoric over these last couple
weeks suggests that he has about as much respect for the American
electoral system as for its (now) Iraqi counterpart.
Two weeks before urging the entire nation Sunday not to
“over-hype” Iraqi elections that are, by any standard, remarkable,
Kerry stood before a large crowd at a Martin Luther King Jr.
breakfast in Boston and declared that in the 2004 American
election, “thousands of people were suppressed in their efforts to
vote.” Showing no understanding of proportion or tact considering
that Islamic fundamentalists marked every voter in Iraq for death,
Kerry went on to compare the democratic processes of America and
Iraq: “In a nation that is willing to spend several hundred million
dollars in Iraq to bring them democracy we cannot tolerate that,
here in America, too many people are denied that democracy.”
As awful as it sounds, Kerry’s Meet the Press
appearance seemed timed to coincide with the election day disaster
we all believed was coming in Iraq, but never materialized. While
Iraqi Kurds and Shias were still dancing in the streets celebrating
their first free elections after more than three decades of
tyranny, Kerry could not have been more dour or pessimistic.
“It is hard to say that something is legitimate when whole
portions of the country can’t vote and don’t vote,” Kerry told
Russert. But what election was he referring to? Was it the one that
was stolen from him or the one that was apparently being stolen
from the Sunnis? The rhetoric is virtually interchangeable. Just
switch the words “Democrats” and “Sunnis” around and he’ll have
enough material to go on for sometime.
Does this jab at Senator Kerry mean either our election system
or Iraq’s is perfect? Of course not. Personally, I’d like to see
college students have to dip their fingers in indelible ink after
voting as well so they can’t canvas a state voting in every town
along the way.
The only vote Kerry was not interested in talking about was the
popular vote (granted Bush didn’t want to talk much about this his
first go around, either) and, more importantly, the Electoral
College vote. The senator bragged to Russert that he won the youth
vote, the independent vote, and the moderate vote. More bizarrely,
Kerry enthused that “If you take half the people at an Ohio State
football game on Saturday afternoon and they were to have voted the
other way, you and I would be having a discussion today about my
State of the Union speech.”
Any conversation on Iraq could not be divorced from his personal
loss in November. It all came back to him, his campaign platform,
and the “very clear, four point plan for precisely how we could be
successful” in Iraq, which he laid out in Fulton, Missouri, during
the campaign. (Does anyone remember this besides Kerry?)
With an obvious eye on 2008, Kerry peppered his appearance with
several un-waffle words such as “unequivocally,” and “I’ve said it
100 times before,” as in “I’m glad Saddam Hussein is gone, and I’ve
said that a hundred times.” This last must be put in some context,
however. Less than a minute before Kerry was asked, “Do you believe
that Iraq is less a terrorist threat to the United States now than
it was two years ago?” He replied, “No, it’s more. And, in fact, I
believe the world is less safe today than it was two and a half
years ago.” So why, again, is he glad Saddam is gone?
Nevertheless, the man looked so proud of himself for answering a
string of questions about whether he agreed with Ted Kennedy’s
Over-the-Moon-and-Out-to-Pasture speech last week about abandoning
Iraq with one simple “No” after another. John Edwards’s barb at
Kerry during the Wisconsin debates — “That’s the longest answer I
ever heard to a yes-or-no question” — apparently cut pretty deep.
Even now, however, Kerry cannot avoid his ubiquitous covering of
the bases, assuring Americans that both he and Senator Kennedy
understood the American presence in Iraq was “part of the problem
today, if not the problem.”
So with all this genius, how did Kerry lose? Well, according to
the senator, it basically came down to the “9/11 hurdle” and that
“When a country is at war and in the wake of 9/11, it’s very
difficult to shift horses in midstream.” Not so long ago, Kerry
suggested to Wisconsin voters that “they shouldn’t be wary of
changing horses midstream when the horse is drowning” and joked,
“May I also suggest that we need a taller horse? You can get
through deeper waters that way.”
Maybe so, but with so little faith in the electoral process on
his part, what horse on the planet would want to attempt to tote
John Kerry across the electoral river — be it the Mississippi or
the Euphrates?
