Smearing Kerry with His Own Record

David K. Landrith

The Republicans have boldly done what no Democrat has done before: They’ve actually described John Kerry’s record after 20 years in the Senate. And this makes Democrats mad as hell. Although it is ostensibly his primary qualification to be President, apparently describing Kerry’s Senate record is below the belt.

In Slate, William Saletan (who is either disingenuous or believes everything that he reads in press reports) informs is that, “[t]he 2004 election is becoming a referendum on your right to hold the president accountable.” But Saletan scornfully dismisses any attempt to hold Kerry accountable. Holding Kerry accountable for claiming to be a war hero is what Saletan has called the “moral descent” toward “the personally nasty.”

But holding Kerry accountable for the paucity of his foreign policy wisdom is also too much for Saletan to handle. Sounding more like a Soviet Commissar than a liberal hack, he bemoans the fact that Republicans continue to restate facts long after they are “debunked” by “press reports.” For him, the presidential election is a referendum whose outcome should be determined by what “press reports” say we should believe.

The New York Time’s Maureen Dowd, in an unusually brainless piece (even for her), states that Cheney spends time with his grandchildren to distract voters from his quest for “global domination.” Rather than address Kerry’s indisputably poor record on foreign affairs, she refers to Senator Miller’s “maniacal litany of weapons he said Mr. Kerry had opposed that can destroy any mud hut in any third world country.”

But Senator Miller doesn’t just name the weapons that he says “won the Cold War and that are now winning the war on terror.” He names the battles that they won: Operation Enduring Freedom, the shooting down of Libyan MiGs over the Gulf of Sidra, the battle of Tora Bora, the tank battle against the Hussein’s Republican Guard in the Gulf War, the bombing of Saddam Hussein and the Taliban, the missions flown to protect the Capital and New York City after 9/11. Notably absent from this list is Dowd’s fabled mud hut.

In The Nation David Corn is frothing at the mouth. Although Senator Miller never criticized Kerry’s war record, Corn says that he “picked up where the so-called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth left off.” Failing to address a single substantive issue in Miller’s speech, Corn is happy to merely characterize him as “Southern demagogue” who “has been a functional Republican for years.” And this, of course, is false. Miller, who is in his 70s, is a lifelong Democrat. He has never voted Republican in a Presidential election. What’s more, he has been careful to identify his continuing affinity for the Democrat party in spite of his support for George Bush.

Read the liberal opinions and you’ll see. Every one of them scrupulously avoids discussing Kerry’s voting record. But if Kerry has such a sterling record in the Senate, then why doesn’t anyone actually say so?

The fact of the matter is that Kerry’s Senate record is repugnant to all but a small extremist fringe in the far left wing of the Democrat Party. This underscores Vice President Cheney’s warning: “A senator can be wrong for 20 years, without consequence to the nation. But a president—a president—always casts the deciding vote.”

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David K. Landrith is a Senior Fellow at Frontiers of Freedom, a non-profit, non-partisan public policy organization dedicated to protecting the constitutional rights of all Americans and restoring constitutional limits on the extent and power of government.

dave@landrith.com