Too MODEST About Vietnam?????

That Kerry has allowed himself to be trumped on the domestic initiative, in favor of his Vietnam war hero fraud, is just one more installment of astonishment at this man’s incompetence in a breathtaking array of them that is bordering on becoming numbing at this point. Once more the rational mind wonders how a purportedly national candidate could let such a thing to happen.

The answer, according to a Boston Globe article today, is that Kerry's advisors were worried that...worried that...I don't know if my incredulity will allow me to spit this out...worried that nobody knew that Kerry was a Vietnam war hero because Kerry was too modest about it.

Yet in meetings with Kerry, McKean and other advisers say, they told the Democrat that he had an extraordinary story of heroism to tell Americans...Indeed, Kerry hyped his Vietnam service at the kickoff, asking his former crewmates to join him on stage. But campaign aides were frustrated when the media did not embrace the war hero storyline and focused instead on the race with then-front-runner Howard Dean. As Dean gained momentum, Kerry's advisers publicly shrugged off the polls, but one statistic stunned some of them.

"A staggering amount of people still didn't know that John was a Vietnam veteran - it was extraordinary," McKean said. "We felt like John's story wasn't breaking through, and it was a critical part of who he was and a critical part of the campaign."

Part of the problem was the candidate. Kerry rarely opened up about Vietnam, leaving the glory for his crewmates to share. But he concentrated on overcoming his own Brahmin-bred modesty, advisers said, talking more than ever about how he had 'bled for his country' and killed Viet Cong.

This has got to be the most conceitedly phony self-effacement imaginable in the mind of man. Nobody knew John Kerry served in Vietnam? Perhaps every American stuck in a phone booth for the past three and half decades. It's only been the raison d 'etere of his entire political career, as recounted in numerous newspaper articles and Senate floor speeches over the years.

To me, though, the key passage in the BG piece is, "focused instead on the race with then-front-runner Howard Dean." No less than former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has opined that the reason Senator Kerry won the Democrat nomination is because Dr. Demented made him look moderate by comparison. But it's my contention that it is Dean who has also been a significant influence in sending Kerry's presidential ambitions skidding into the ditch.

Arguably Kerry's biggest bungle in this campaign has been his whipsawing attempts to formulate a coherent message on Iraq. First he's for it, then he's against it, then he's for it, then he's against it, and always seemingly somewhere in between at the same time. But it wasn't always that way.

Kerry began laying the groundwork for his presidential run years in advance by positioning himself as a hawk on the issue of toppling Saddam Hussein. He was one of the most consistent Dem voices in the Senate in favor of Bill Clinton's regime-change policy, and continued in that stance into the Bush Administration, right through his vote in favor of Operation Iraqi Freedom. The reason, in light of his designs on the White House, seems obvious: to insulate himself from the gaping liability that his Vietnam-era seditions and legislative pacifism of his first decade in the Senate. Any opponent's citation of his earlier dovishness could be countered by pointing to his muscular anti-Saddam stance. Indeed, a public apology for his libelous and betraying 1971 Senate testimony would have dovetailed perfectly, effectively neutralizing that part of his life as a threat to his presidential ambitions in the here and now.

Then came Howard Dean. The former Vermont governor shot into the stratosphere of the runup to the Dem primaries by being as big and loud an anti-war agitator vis-a-vie Iraq (and Bushophobe) as the Boston Balker had ever been about Vietnam. The Democrat nominating electorate was eating it up, and Kerry's lifelong dream right along with it.

This, as his Senate collegue Joe Biden has admitted, is why Lurch voted against the $87 billion Iraq war appropriations bill. It was a desperate attempt to compete for that collective zealots' fervor while there was still time.

In the end, Dean's head figuratively exploded on the plains of Iowa, and Kerry was there with his "coerced and bribed" "band of brothers" to harvest his constituency's votes. But it left him with a very big problem not so easily resolved: his carefully laid buffer against his earlier national security weaknesses now sported a hole big enough for a tank. And Bush-Cheney has poured through an entire tank army.

John Kerry would have led with his Vietnam bio in any case; it's the core of his personal and political identity. It's his security blanket. He's wrapped up every campaign he's ever run in that package of tall tales. But by not leaving himself any avenues of maneuver or retreat, and not defusing potential disasters beforehand - in essence, by stubbornly insisting on putting his personal pride ahead of prudent campaign strategy - he's trapped himself in a box of his own making. The Swiftboat Vets have demolished his Vietnam gimmick, he's made a hash of terrorism and Iraq, and the only thing he's known for on domestic issues is glomming on to whatever tangentially opportune item comes across the daily news wire.

He is, in a word, stuck.