Obama's Lessons Learned From Sen. Kerry
By: Stonecipher
June 15, 2008
Last November I was very irritated when I came across this article in the Massachusetts based Patriot-Ledger.
The article featured an interview with Sen. John Kerry in which he claimed he was now finally ready to take on the Swift Boaters. Great job John. By 2007 you were prepared to take on the people who sunk your 2004 Presidential bid.
For those of you who don’t remember, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth were an organization set up to trash John Kerry’s name and his record as a war hero and drag it through the mud in an effort to prevent him from beating George W. Bush in the General Election in 2004.
The group claimed that Kerry, as commander of a Swift Boat in Vietnam, did not act honorably as an American Soldier and worse, he distorted the record’s of other American Soldiers upon his return to the United States when he worked to get the U.S. out of Vietnam.
Of course, only one of the members of SBVT, Stephen Gardner, actually served with Kerry in Vietnam, and he was not present for any of the events that were in question.
In fact, of the surviving members of Kerry’s crew, Gardner was the only one who did not fully support the Senator from Massachusetts in his run for President.
Many of Kerry’s other former crew members campaigned with him on a regular basis, calling the allegations of the Swift Boaters "garbage" and "totally false."
But Kerry’s supporters and surrogates never produced any slick TV advertisements like the Swift Boaters did in an effort to counter the smears. Kerry’s key advisors told him that he should "stay above the fray" and basically ignore the attacks.
I vividly remember watching this unfold, and it was exceedingly frustrating.
As a liberal, as a Democrat and an American, I knew another four years of George W. Bush was a terrible idea. At the same time I was getting completely fed up with Democrats who were allowing the GOP to walk all over them. Slanderous attacks from The Right were constantly bombarding The Left and The Left simply tried to absorb the blows. They didn’t fight back.
So with Bush, Karl Rove and the rest of the unified right-wingers all on message and continuously calling Kerry a flip-flopper; and with video of Kerry saying "I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it" one would think he would at least address and explain the issue, rather than changing the subject and dismissing it as "one of those inarticulate moments."
By ignoring the issue Kerry seemed guilty.
The real reason Kerry voted for the $87 billion military funding bill for operations in Iraq in Afghanistan is that originally, Kerry himself had co-sponsored an amendment to that bill which demanded that the $87 billion be paid for, in part, by rolling back Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy. His reasoning was that many middle and working class families were paying dearly for the war in Iraq, but only a tiny percentage of Americans at the upper end of the economic spectrum were facing any kind of burden what-so-ever.
Polling data suggests that the rest of the country agreed with this general philosophy, and Kerry voted for the bill that contained his amendment, but it failed to pass the whole Senate.
So when the bill came up for a vote again, without the payment plan attached, Kerry voted against it.
The last three paragraphs I wrote could easily fit into a 30-second spot explaining his position.
There would even be time left over to make the point that Bush needed the $87 billion for the war due to his terrible planning in the first place. And it wouldn’t have hurt to tack on that Bush originally told us that the entire cost of the war would be roughly $60 billion and that once Saddam was gone the oil from the region would allow for this war to "pay for itself."
Instead Kerry occasionally defended himself in an interview, but generally he and his surrogates chose to change the subject and simply not fight. There was certainly no campaign-wide, organized effort to bring a halt to the smears.
What it came down to was that in 2004 John Kerry and the Democrats were afraid of looking and sounding "mean."
After reading all of this one might guess that a candidate like Hillary Clinton would be just what I would prescribe for the Democratic Party in 2008.
A self-described "fighter", there is no doubt in anyone’s minds that Hillary Clinton would not back down from a fight. Well, at least not now. Not in 2008, when a fight with the GOP and/or George Bush is very politically convenient.
But the problem with Hillary Clinton is not just that the Democrats need someone willing to fight, they also need someone who will defend themselves and The Party. Clinton did not do this effectively.
Prior to 2006 the Democrats could not stop the bleeding, with over a decade of losing elections due to a weak offense and no defense to speak of what-so-ever. The only reason the losses weren’t greater is because they were up against the completely belligerent offense of the GOP.
Fortunately for Democrats, Americans and the rest of the planet, the Democrats finally learned how to win an election in 2006.
Taking back Congress in a mid-term election the Democrats learned that fighting back did not mean belligerent, unfair and false attacks. Under the leadership of Howard Dean and Rahm Emanuel, the Democrats found their voice and began making a clear, logic-based case against the Iraq War and the Republicans while simultaneously defending themselves from the belligerence of the Republicans.
Earlier, I expressed my irritation with John Kerry for not figuring out how to fight back until it was three years too late, but his 2007 remarks were an indication that he has learned something.
I can’t speak for The Senator, but my guess is that Kerry watched Emanuel’s no-nonsense, tough, but fair approach to winning back the House of Representatives and Howard Dean’s 50-state, independent-friendly strategy and he realized he should have done things differently. The liberals in traditionally blue states, like himself, were not the people he needed to worry about.
The people Kerry should have gone after were those people who thought differently from him, but who were open to hearing his message, the 20% in the middle of the political spectrum.
In 2008 every Democrat new that a different path than the one taken in 2004 would be necessary, the question was which path? Would it be the new path that John Kerry had finally discovered in 2007 or would they borrow the GOP’s path of belligerence?
Hillary Clinton gave us the option of the latter, and Barack Obama gave us most of the Dean/Emanuel path that Kerry was finally on, but it still lacked defense.
In one shining moment, Barack Obama very successfully defended himself against the initial breaking of the Rev. Wright story with his "Speech on Race". Aside from that, however, his campaign lacked an effective, organized and coherent defensive strategy.
With the recent creation of a new website, however, called FightTheSmears.com that has begun to change.
There was nothing like this, at least nothing as well publicized as this within the Kerry Campaign in 2004. But in 2008 Obama’s Campaign is giving his supporters a tool to organize their defense.
The new site may not be a catch-all defense, or even the best possible defense mechanism for Barack Obama, but it serves as a welcome sign to his supporters.
Sen. Obama is signaling that he is thinking about playing defense this year. He seems to have learned the lessons from Sen. Kerry and the 2004 election and he is acting on what he has learned as well.
Maybe more important, however, is that in 2008 those of us who support the Democratic Nominee for President will not have to feel like we are fighting the defensive battles without any support form our home base.
Someone is going to have our back this year, and when we need back up in the field, this time we know where to turn.
So when the P.U.M.A. people, or Rush Limbaugh or the McCain Campaign launch another phony story, like the Michelle Obama "whitey" tape, there will be an organized effort to end the slime, and that is some welcomed change in American Politics.
