Rove Revels in Democrat Kerry's Lead [View All]

[Emillereid]

By Bob Woodward
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 18, 2004; Page A15

By early February 2004, White House political adviser Karl Rove could see that Iraq was turning into a potential negative. The violence on the ground continued. The U.S. military had more than 100,000 troops there and would require that many or more for some time. American soldiers were being killed at too high a rate, and the administration hadn't reached a political settlement. Turning the government over to the Iraqis looked shaky. The failure to find any weapons of mass destruction, and President Bush's and CIA Director George J. Tenet's public acknowledgments that the intelligence might have been wrong, were potentially big setbacks.




Previously, Rove had claimed he was salivating that the Democrats would nominate former Vermont governor Howard Dean in the 2004 presidential race. But Dean had imploded and Sen. John F. Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat, had won 12 of the first 14 Democratic primary contests and appeared to be headed for the nomination. Politics is a game of recovery, adaptability and optimism. So Rove had a new line.




"The good news for us is that Dean is not the nominee," Rove now argued to an associate in his second-floor West Wing office. Dean's unconditional opposition to the Iraq war could have been potent in a face-off with Bush. "One of Dean's strengths, though, was he could say, I'm not part of that crowd down there." But Kerry was very much a part of the Washington crowd, and he had voted in favor of the resolution for war. Rove got out his two-inch-thick, loose-leaf binder titled "Bring It On." It consisted of research into Kerry's 19-year record in the Senate. Most relevant were pages 9 to 20 of the section on Iraq.




The record was that Kerry had been all over the map. Sounding like a method actor who believes his lines, Rove offered some readings from the Kerry record. ....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A19692-2004Apr17.html

I think this article pretty much sums up my fears about Kerry being our candidate -- he has a record a mile long of that Rove can exploit. Kerry has, and keeps trying to have, it every which way on the Iraq war -- God, I wish he had the spine to stand up and say: "The Iraq war was wrong and as President I will get American forces and corporations out of there, pay reparations for the tremendous damage inflicted on that all but defenseless country and leave Iraqi history to the Iraqi people. Yes, I voted for the IWR for a lot of complicated reasons, but I now see that it was a mistake to give war authority to this imbecile President and I regret it. But may history judge me kindly if as President I do everything in my power to undo all the damage that Bush and his gang have done." Now that would be a candidate I could vote and work for!