QandO

August 25, 2004

Misunderestimating W. Again.
Posted by Dale Franks

Zev Chafets writes, once again, the Democrats have underestimated George W. Bush's political skills, and Kerry is paying the price.

Or, perhaps they've overestimated John Kerry's.

In any event, the Swiftvets ads have started to hurt Kerry badly, and his response has been foolish. Forst he tried to silence them, then he tried to get the president to silence them.

And that was exactly what Bush has been waiting for.

On Monday, down in Crawford, Tex., Dubya hitched up his jeans, sauntered out to a press conference and allowed as to how he'd be glad to help his worthy opponent. But, just to be fair, he said, let's shut down the negative campaigning by all 527 groups. Goodbye, Swifties. So long, MoveOn. Just say the word, Sen. Kerry, and we'll take all the nasty dollars out of politics.

But Kerry hasn't said that word. He probably can't. His entire campaign finance structure is predicated on 527 money. Of the top 10 soft donors, nine are Kerry supporters. Combined, they have already raised more than $100 million for the Democrats. The Swifties, by contrast, have raised much less than 1% of that. For Bush, soft money is just a dab of Texas perfume; for Kerry, it's oxygen.

So, the President comes off as the champion of upright McCain-Feingold reform, while Kerry is stuck with George Soros & Co. If the senator cuts off his billionaire backers, he suffocates. If he sticks with Soros, et al., he's stuck with the Swifties, too. That's a hook Kerry can wriggle on until Nov. 2. Then Bush will throw him back.

If Kerry reallt wants to stop the bleeding, then he'll have to hold a press conference specifically to invite questions about the Swiftvets ads. But, that's the one thing he simply can't do, because the dangers are too high.

He'll have to cover the whole Cambodia/Magic Hat story. Why does the last entry in his diary from Vietnam indicate he'd never been to Cambodia? How could he mistake Christmas in Cambodia, which was seared--seared!--into his memory? Why did he write about his Cambodia experiences in his writted review of Apocalypse now in 1979? When, exactly, was he in Cambodia? What was he doing?

And that's just the beginning. He'll have to cover the Purple Hearts,and his Bronze Star for the Rassman rescue. Then he'll have to move on to talk about VVAW. He'll have to explain why he is so proud of his service in Vietnam, a war he made a career of opposing, and how, if he did take part in the atrocities he has admitted to, fighting there can be both terribly wrong and immoral, and, at the same time, such a source of pride.

Then, of course, as some point, we'd have to get into the whole 527 deal, and he would have to explain why his Soros-based funding of 527s is substantially different from Bush's, whose links to the Swiftvets are way more tenuous than his campaign's associations with MoveOn, org.

No, the questions in that press conference won't get any easier as the conference goes on.

Which is why I don'tthink he'll do it. I think he'll try to ride this thing out until the Republican convention, which should take some presure off of him, and hope that a week concentrating on other things will move the media past the story, and on to the fall campaign.

Good luck with that.

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