It's not working

It just hit me why the Kerry campaign is floundering, and why Kerry himself seems so pissed and at a loss.

It’s not working.

I was reading A Large Regular and came across his entry from August 28th for a speech the junior Senator from Massachusetts gave to a group of Cubans in Miami. Senator Kerry told them he’d voted FOR an anti-Castro bill, the Helms-Burton Act, but a few days later it came out that he had actually voted AGAINST it. When pressed, the Kerry campaign explained Senator Kerry had voted FOR it, in its earlier, purer form, but AGAINST it in its final form.

Sound familiar?

That was when the pieces snapped into place for me.

John Kerry has been preparing for his presidential campaign for decades. He knows full well how difficult it has been for senators to get into the White House, even those born in the “west wing.” His strategy has been – for decades – exactly this straddle. Vote one way when it doesn’t count, the opposite when it does. Vote FOR the Iraq funding early, but AGAINST at the final tally.

“I actually voted for the $87 billion, before I voted against it!”

If you listen to The Vast Right Wing Conspiracy on the radio, you’ve heard that line in Senator Kerry’s own voice many times. Play it back again in your mind right now. Do you hear the surprise? It was the first time this carefully constructed ploy was caught out. He sounded like he just couldn’t believe it, like he’d walked into a room and hit the light switch only to discover it was during a black-out.

Poor Senator Kerry. For at least 20 years – and maybe 35 or more – he’s been planning to run this drill. It would have worked, too, except for the new media. Without the internet, Rush, FOX, the Wall Street Journal, the rest of talk radio and the blogoshpere blowing his cover, pulling away the curtain like Toto at Oz, it would have worked. No wonder Senator Kerry told the Washington Post he wished Lexus-Nexus had a delete button.

The other day I was driving home from Miami and for about an hour in the midst of the sugar cane fields the only station I could get on my cheap AM radio was Air America. Al Franken was talking about that rat bastard Zell Miller (D Georgia) and his “totally untrue” claim that Senator John Kerry (D – Massachusetts) had voted against the auction list of weapons systems. Franken informed us that in “almost every case, either Dick Cheney had voted against it too, or Kerry had voted FOR it many, many times before voting against it.”

EXACTLY!

Kerry had built what he thought would be a defensive stronghold of positive votes only to vote his true ideas at the end of the line. Where the rubber meets the road, he IS the Senate’s most liberal member, but before that? When it doesn’t count, when it can’t hurt his liberal cause, before the final tallies, Kerry craftily (he thought but clumsily as it turned out) tried to inoculate himself with meaningless votes FOR.
What does this say about John F. Kerry the man?

First, it says he is a fool. It was stupid to think this trick, so effective in his polarized and homogonous home state, would work at the national level. Like a college football coach going to the NFL, what works at one level doesn’t at the next. Kerry is the Steve Spurrier of presidential politics, and I say that as a true Florida Gator and Spurrier fan.

Second, it says he is no leader. The way Washington works, every Congressman and Senator will be caught in the pincers of a bill’s transformation from committee to draft to conference to final vote. But over time and repetition, Kerry’s steady stream of flip-flops on national security issues was noticed. No wonder Senator Kerry authored and co-sponsored so few bills. Sponsoring your own bill leaves you no maneuvering room. As to co-sponsoring, what senator would want him, knowing he would bail out at the crucial moment?

Third, it says he’s arrogant. He really thought he could get away with “I actually voted for it, before I voted against it.” He thought we’d be too stupid to remember, to notice, to figure it out. He’s just so much smarter than you or I, don’t you see?

Fourth, John Kerry has been captured by the system. Disregard for a moment the apparent congruity between his actions in the Navy with his votes FOR/AGAINST in the Senate. At the least, his surprised defense of his flip-flopping shows he thinks this is all perfectly fine. It’s what anybody would do! And in Washington, he’s mostly right. It IS what most of them do. That’s why most Presidents come from the ranks of State governors. Voters, other than today’s Democrat primary voters, understand that a President needs to be steadfast if he is to lead. A president can and should use all the nuance he can assemble in order to make a decision, but once he’s made his decision, he must lead. Oh and there must be more than a decision that he really ought to be the President.

It isn’t that Kerry is a flip-flopper. After all, any reasonable open minded person changes his mind when facts and circumstances change. It is that John Kerry is a premeditated conniving serial flip-flopper who always manages to make his final spasms to the Left.