Bungled Kerry Campaign Swatting At Flies

by Alexander Cockburn

Who would you rather have in your corner, Sasso or Baker? In its hour of need the Kerry campaign brings on board James Sasso, breathlessly described in one news story as "canny and ruthless," but mostly known to the world as one of the men who ran the Dukakis campaign in 1988, which was about as far from "canny and ruthless" as you can go without leaving the earth's gravitational field. Right behind Sasso comes Stan Greenburg, fresh from his disastrous stint advising the Venezuelan right how to recall Hugo Chavez. Meanwhile, the Bush crowd brings on former secretary of state James Baker to handle negotiations for the presidential debates. Yes, Baker, the man who negotiated the theft of the election in Florida in 2002. If you hunted for words that best describe Baker, "canny and ruthless" would do nicely.

When historians come to dissect the Kerry campaign, they will surely marvel at the rich platter of issues handed to the Democratic candidate, which he has thrust from him with shudders of distaste and instead turned back, like Mencken's Bryan, to swat at flies.

Read the report of the 9/11 Commission, as Kerry and his "strategists" (a hold-all word these days, meaning anyone on a political campaign a reporter has been able to raise on the phone) have surely done, and there are mounds of fragrant dung to hurl at Bush and Cheney: the warnings from the FBI and CIA ignored by the White House; the obvious lies about Cheney getting Bush's go-ahead to issue the shoot-down orders that never reached the Navy pilots.

You'd think that the Kerry campaign would have put together a group of 9/11 widows and, along the lines of the Swift Boat vets, had them trail Bush, denouncing him as the man who slept through the warnings of imminent attack by Al Qaeda. It's all there on the plate, but Kerry has spurned it. Sept. 11 is off the table.

Read the U.S. Senate report on the manipulation of intelligence to concoct the bogus WMD, used as the rationale for invasion. The report is replete with detailed stories of Cheney's eight visits to the CIA headquarters at Langley to browbeat the analysts, plus scores of kindred jimmying of the data. Kerry could have said he'd voted war-making powers to the president, because he and his colleagues were served up lies.

But no, Kerry hops around on the issue all summer, and then, after all the war whoops in Boston, sends out Jamie Rubin to tell the Washington Post that "knowing then what he knows today" about the lack of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons in Iraq, Kerry still would have voted to authorize the war and, "in all probability," would have launched a military attack to oust Hussein by now if he were president.

As a piece of tactical stupidity, it's hard to beat. There on the plate in front of Kerry was probably the best documented account of White House deceptions in living memory, and he thrust it away. Fake WMDs are off the table.

In fact, the whole war is off the table, vanishing into velleities as Kerry refines and redefines, shifts from foot to foot and says he would have done it all different. As the WMD issue vanished back into the kitchen and Kerry began to plummet in the polls, Rubin was redeployed. He apologized to the Washington Post for his "in all probability" phrase and ventured that it was "unknowable" whether Kerry would have waged the war. How about that for a rallying cry to those millions of antiwar voters out there! From No to Unknowable.

Spygate? The nation's secrets being filched by Bush's neo-Cons, passed to Israel and to Teheran? The only surprise here is that Kerry hasn't already called for charges to be dropped against any and all suspects and urged the dismissal of FBI investigators on grounds of anti-Semitism.

In Afghanistan, America's man Hamid Karzai can drive around bits of Kabul in relative safety, the same way that America's man Iyad Allawi can display himself in a couple of acres of downtown Baghdad. Elsewhere the Taliban rules, and Osama takes his noonday mountain hikes in the Hindu Kush. But for Kerry, Afghanistan is off the table.

Pretty much everything's off the table, except for some Kerry rhetoric which no one believes about a health plan and taxing people who make more than $200,000. The U.S. Supreme Court? Kerry said in mid-summer he wouldn't hesitate to nominate an anti-choice justice. On the heels of this crafty rallying cry to his core supporters he sent the Rubin-like disclaimer that he wouldn't want to have a Supreme Court that reversed Roe v. Wade. Hang your hat on that.

The CIA is on the table, but not in encouraging way since Kerry touts the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, which wants to go back to the era before the Church hearings of the mid-'70s. The Senate and House Democrats are now backing off opposition to Bush's nominee as CIA director, Rep. Porter Goss, seemingly on a signal from the Kerry Campaign.

So what have Kerry supporters and prospective supporters got to hang their hat on? Not much, which is why most of the ones I meet seem wan and out of sorts, reduced to mutterings about fascism's march. It may indeed be on the march, but there are no spirited vows from Kerry that he'll stand in its path. Just the other day, in a debate on NPR, one of his "strategists" boasted he'd drafted some of the Patriot Act's language.

Once there was a vibrant antiwar movement, outside the Democratic Party, and therefore with some purchase on the candidates. Howard Dean took care of that, and the Democratic National Committee took care of Dean. Now there's pro-war Kerry, with no aggressive anti-war movement to push him to the Left. All's quiet on the western front. The Left is in a funk, spouting nonsensical scenarios about 9/11, abandoning all long-term issues. Meanwhile the Empire is out of money, and the housing bubble is due to burst in the not too distant future. Why talk about that? This election, reality is off the table. As someone said, back in 1995, "Political campaigns are the graveyard of real ideas and the birthplace of empty promises." Who was that? Teresa Heinz in the Utne Reader, just before she married Kerry. My bet is on a very low turnout.