Team Kerry Suffers Hostile Takeover

What do you do when your ship is sinking and you try to right it by rearranging the deck chairs? If you’re John Kerry, the answer appears to be to drill a second hole in the hull and hope all the water runs out.

I called the Boston Bacchanalia a “train wreck,” and how prescient a metaphor that was. Lurch’s message was “I am a Vietnam war hero” and the Swiftboat Vets have made mincemeat of it. It was the only message he’s fielded in this campaign that he hadn’t “nuanced” and flip-flopped and obfuscated to death, as well as the only one that he’d stuck with consistently for more than a couple of news cycles. Now it’s gone, and he basically has nothing to say because he’s not identified with anything else.

Naturally, it’s all the fault of his advisors and staff, who “haven’t served him well,” even though he was the one who chose them. Sounds like Skeletor’s regular complaint at the end of every He-Man episode. What’s the saying? “Who’s more foolish, the fool or the man who keeps the fool in his employ?”

So out goes “Tad” Devine as campaign spokesman and demoted are Bob Schrum and Mary Beth Cahill – Kennedyites, if you’ll remember – and in come another wave of Clintonoids, led by the latest white knight, former Clinton press pit bull Joe Lockhart. Which is interesting in that it was the top Clinton operative at the DNC, Terry McAuliffe, who inserted Hillary Clinton onto the Democrat “truth {snicker} squad” over the objections of the Kerry campaign. Now I’m not about to plunge off onto another Clinton conspiracy tangent, but given the rank incompetence displayed by the non-Clinton people in Kerry’s shop (and Kerry himself, don’t forget), and the…no, I won’t use the word “panic,” it’s so overdramatic – call it “profound disquietude” at their recent slide in the polls just as President Bush is starting to surge ahead, the situation is perfect for the Clintons to send in their people to effectively sabotage Kerry permanently and finish him off, clearing the decks for Mrs. Clinton in ’08.

Is that actually going on behind the scenes? Who knows? But judging by what took place today, it doesn’t seem that big of a stretch.

It ought to be day-glo obvious to everybody in that campaign that bullying, blustering, bluffing, and BSing isn’t going to make the Swiftboat Vet controversy go away. The Swifties themselves have already said that they’re in this for the duration. And, my God, look at the success they’ve had – why in the world would they stop now?

But what they’ve also said – and reiterated just today – is that if Kerry will fess up to his lies about his combat record and apologize for smearing his greater “band of brothers” before the entire world thirty-three years ago (which took place after his secret meeting in Paris with North Vietnamese officials, BTW), that will be sufficient for them.

They have, IOW, offered him the only way out of this nightmare that is demolishing his presidential ambitions like a combine mowing through a wheat field. So what have his new Clintonoid staffers advised him to do?

According to Kerry insiders, the candidate will attack his Swift Boat Veterans for Truth critics, by claiming it was he who stood up for veterans and the missing in action during his days in the Senate. ‘This is going to be the big pushback,’ says a Kerry adviser. ‘He will take this Swift Boat guys on, and then put the debate to rest. He isn't going to let this spin out of control for days on end. We won't let it.’

This is insane. It’s like a man trying to head-butt his way through a brick wall dazedly reasoning that one more blow will open up the hole. This “strategy” is just another diversion, since “standing up for veterans and the MIAs during his days in the Senate” both ducks his smearing of those same veterans in 1971 and directs public attention to his Senate record – which is such a liability even to Kerry himself that he almost completely ignored it in his own convention speech by hiding behind the Vietnam hero gimmick that led to this mess in the first place.

But they’re not looking at it that way. Heck, they’re not looking at it at all.

"The Republicans have had three good weeks. Let's be realistic and honest about this. Just three good weeks,’ says the Kerry adviser in Washington. ‘We've had three good months. Once their convention is over, the American people will be able to size up the candidates and the issues. Our guy will win that comparison.’

This is the epitome of “whistling past the graveyard.” Their “three good months” had nothing to do with them and everything to do with their hard-left 527s burying the White House under a tsunami of slime ads. That angle has long since peaked and what remains of it has been blunted by the Swifties’ success, the resounding defense of Bush’s war leadership at the GOP convention this week, and the fact, as I predicted months ago, that the closer we got to election day the more visible Kerry would have to become, and the more visible Kerry became the more people would know him, and the more they knew him, the less they would like him.

So Kerry goes to the American Legion convention – once again trailing behind the President like the dinghy following in the wake of the aircraft carrier – and, sure enough, there’s no change. Same old stump speech. Nothing about the Swift Vets. Nothing to address their allegations. Instead, he tries to change the subject back to Iraq, of which, if you’ll recall, he had made a complete hash before the Swifties shot into the stratosphere.

He praised the troops in Iraq, which just raises his vote against the $87 Iraq war appropriation again. And he actually mentioned “keeping the faith” after the war – the Vietnam war. I realize this is an oft-asked question these days, but what is this guy thinking?

Jim Geraghty hacked it apart at some length:

"We will always fight for them and we will fight for all our fellow veterans because we know that the first definition of patriotism is keeping faith with those who wore the uniform of the United States."

Senator, did you keep faith with those who wore the uniform in 1971? How about Michael Moore, is he keeping faith, creating a film now being screened by Hezbollah?

"No one in the United States doubted the outcome in Iraq or how swiftly the war would be won."

There are a slew of “We’re stuck in a quagmire after three days” headlines that say differently, Senator.

“I never would have diverted resources so quickly from Afghanistan before finishing the job.”

The “Iraq diverted us from Afghanistan” argument is nonsense. See here.

“I would’ve given the inspectors the time they needed to do the job.”

You said that process amounted to Saddam “buying time and playing a game” in February 2002, Senator. Why did you suddenly develop more confidence in a good faith effort on the part of Saddam Hussein?

“I would’ve made sure that every soldier put in harm’s way had the equipment and body armor they needed.”

AHEM. The vote on $87 billion.

He even said he would have turned the American troops over to NATO and the UN. “I'm shocked he didn't get booed,” a KerrySpot reader emailed. “People behind him on stage were averting their eyes when he tried to reach for their hands.”

Reportedly the venue for the AL convention has a capacity of 5,000, but held a crowd for Kerry’s grandstanding address of as little as a few hundred, who only really seemed to rejoice when Kerry stopped talking.

Initial Big Media reports of Kerry’s egg-laying were, of course, de facto DNC press releases. Mentioned his saluting a lot (but rather badly) and how he received a “warmer welcome” from the AL than he did the VFW week before last. Nothing really good enough to turn around his campaign, but at least a place to potentially start stopping the bleeding. At least in theory.
And then Karl Rove struck.

Turning the Kerryoids’ new “instant response” posture against them with Pavlovian ease, the President’s #1 politico effortlessly manipulated them into stepping all over the spin they were painstakingly trying to create.

From the AP:

White House strategist Karl Rove said Wednesday that Senator John Kerry had tarnished the records of fellow Vietnam veterans with his anti-war protests, prompting a blistering response from the Democrat's campaign. ‘Who in the hell is Karl Rove, talking about John Kerry's war record?’ asked retired Air Force General Merrill McPeak.

McPeak – who couldn’t shine Tommy Franks’ boots, BTW – wasn’t listening. Rove didn’t utter a peep about Kerry’s war record – he referenced his anti-war record after he came home.

Another Kerry backer called on President Bush's top political adviser to resign.

And presumably also be frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs, too…

’It was a period of intense feeling on both sides for and against the war, but I think that was painting with far too broad a brush to tarnish the records and service of people who were defending our country and fighting communism and doing what they thought was right," Rove said during the 30-minute session with AP reporters and editors...

’I do know that John Kerry has said, “Judge me by my record” and spent a lot of time talking about his service in Vietnam, which we ought to honor,’ Rove said. ‘There are not going to be ads and such by the Bush campaign about this, but it's something that the American people have a right to take into consideration.’

IOW, “Busted!” Nothing the blogosphere hasn’t been saying for the past month.

McPeak said voters should also consider the fact that Rove received a student deferment when he graduated from high school in 1969. Democrats also note Vice President Dick Cheney's five Vietnam-era deferments.

There’s the irrelevant, question-ducking counter-attack.

Kerry aides, ordered by their boss to respond to virtually every attack on his military record, hastily arranged a conference call with two prominent veterans, former Senators Bob Kerrey, D-NE, and Max Cleland, D-GA, who accused Rove of coordinating with a GOP-leaning group of veterans that has been attacking Kerry's combat record and later anti-war activities.

Oh, God, hasn’t Kerry exploited those poor bastards enough by now?

In the AP interview, Rove strongly denied that he is linked to the [Swiftboat Vets]. ‘Those guys ought to stop drinking from the swamp. The fevers are getting to them,’ he said.

End result? The story is no longer about Kerry’s remarks, such as they were, to the American Legion, but about his new surrogates’ hair-trigger overreaction to fresh criticism on an issue on which Kerry is absolutely hemorrhaging.

And that’s where the possible ulterior motives of the Clinton machine come in. Kerry needs desperately to change the subject, but he has no safe harbor to which he can turn, and Clintonoid strategists that are deployed to keep public focus square in the same place every time “their guy” gets criticized on it.

It worked for Clinton primarily because most of the public liked him, and because when Mr. Bill got in trouble, it was always after his elections, not smack in the middle of them. Kerry enjoys neither advantage, and has as little “plausible deniability” as he does credibility. Which means reflexive PR decapitation isn’t the appropriate tactic for the predicament in which Mr. French finds himself.

Care to bet that Bill & Hillary don’t know that as well as Mr. Rove?