THE PERFECT STORM:

Unfit for Command? (Tony Blankley, 8/11/04, Jewish World Review)

The book appears to be meticulously researched and reported. It is replete with copious footnotes, a detailed index and two appendices. Firsthand witnesses are named and quoted verbatim to support each specific, shocking charge. Each charge of false heroics is logically presented. The authors quote the official Navy citation and then present the purported eyewitness testimony that refutes the official finding. The witnesses who are summoned forth are officers and men who served simultaneously with Kerry in Coastal Division 11 and purport to be eyewitnesses to the events in question.

And yet, there is another group of men, the sailors who served directly under John Kerry on the same boat with him — his band of brothers. They have traveled around the country with Mr. Kerry and have vouched for his description of his heroic, able and selfless service to our country.

One of these groups of men are lying through their teeth. [...]

The men making the charges are almost all of his fellow officers and the higher chain of command in Kerry's Coastal Division 11. The book points out that on John Kerry's Website he has a photo of himself and 19 fellow swift boat officers, taken while they were simultaneously serving in that unit. Of those 19 fellow officers, 11 have asked him to stop using their image with him. Of the remaining eight, two are deceased, four don't wish to be involved, and one is not a supporter of Kerry but didn't have the opportunity to sign the letter calling for the photo to be taken off the Website. Only one of the 19, Skip Barker, supports Mr. Kerry.

The most enjoyable part of this story is that the Democrats brought it on themselves when they decided to have a primary season devoid of any serious campaigning. Had John Edwards run as if he was trying to be elected President of the United States rather chosen Prom King these issues would have been aired. Instead, at the behest of Terry McAuliffe--who has to be Karl Rove's secret robot--they played nice and ended up with a candidate who was completely untested and whose campaign organization is in way over its collective head, making one dreadful decision after another.

You'd think they'd have at least learned their lesson on Vietnam when they tried to make the President's Guard service an issue but it gave the GOP the opening it needed to drape Mr. Kerry's own anti-war activism around his neck. But no, they went right back to the well at the Convention and have turned August, a month they had to themselves, into an unwinnable debate over whether the Senator should be ashamed of just his anti-war record or his war record too.

When the Senator vowed the other day that he'd have gone to war in Iraq, no matter what, it suggested that their internal polling must indicate that he's lost any national security credibility they hoped to gain with their odd Apocalypse Now production at the Convention. The only focus of his candidacy--the four and half months in Vietnam, thirty years ago--is turning into a negative and they've got nothing else to offer. He can't run on a liberal Senate record devoid of legislative accomplishment and he's not done much else--besides serve as Michael Dukakis's lieutenant governor (don't look for him to bring that up anytime soon). And they have not a single idea for what he'd do the next four years that he can talk about--raising taxes may be red meat for the Boston crowd but it won't play outside the Fleet Center.

So we have a candidate who is floundering badly as he heads into the portion of the calendar that favors his opponent most. The Bush campaign is just now gearing up, with Karen Hughes returning to work this weekend. Every day takes us further from the handover of sovereignty in Iraq and further into the economic recovery. The GOP Convention in NYC comes just before the anniversary of 9-11. The President actually has a set of ideas that he's going to run on--featuring Social Security privatization as a key next step in the transition to an Ownership Society--not to mention the most impressive record of achievements since FDR--victory in two wars; no domestic terrorist incidents since 9-11; missile defense; Middle East democratization; AIDs assistance to Africa; enhanced relations with India, Russia, etc.; three tax cuts; NCLB; numerous trade deals; Medicare reform and HSAs; abortion and embryonic stem cell limits; the Faith Based Initiative; and so on and so forth. September thus shapes up as a month where the President's agenda crowds out all else.

Then we get to the debates where the personally unlikable Senator has to answer all the tough questions no one asked him in the primaries and can't change the subject because he's not running on any ideas of his own. Meanwhile, in order to appeal to the middle he's basically endorsed almost the entire Bush record, with the one caveat that he could run things better--a proposition that's called into question by the fact he's never run anything and made difficult to sell by his lack of any common touch.

This is how the iceberg must have felt watching the Titanic go down.

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 11, 2004 11:37 AM