People Who Live In Glass Houses

[catherineD]

...in 1994, Kerry announced that he was "delighted" by the Republican takeover of Congress, because the voters had penalized the Democrats for their "screw-ups" -- including Clinton's and Kennedy's proposals for universal health care. "I want this change," Kerry told the Boston Herald. "The Democrats have articulated . . . a very poor agenda. It's hard for me to believe that some of these guys could have been as either arrogant or obtuse as to not know where the American people were coming from."


The civil rights movement, Kerry warned, had evolved into a legalistic and divisive struggle over affirmative action quotas that alienated white voters. "The truth is that affirmative action has kept America thinking in racial terms," he said.




On Jan. 22, 1991, Kerry's office sent a letter to a constituent, thanking him for expressing opposition to the deployment of additional US troops in Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf. "I share your concerns," Kerry wrote, noting that on Jan. 11 he had voted in favor of a resolution opposing giving the president immediate authority to go to war and seeking to give economic sanctions more time to work.

On Jan. 31, the same constituent received a letter stating that, "From the outset of the invasion, I have strongly and unequivocally supported President Bush's response to the crisis and the policy goals he has established with our military deployment in the Persian Gulf."



In the gravitational pull of President Clinton's crushing 33-percent victory over Bob Dole in Massachusetts, Kerry beat Weld by 191,508 votes, or 7.5 percent of the 2.55 million cast At his victory party on election night, Kerry proclaimed, "We made this a race about health care for poor children, and when we finish, the Kerry-Kennedy health care bill for children will provide all children in America with health care!"

But with the election over, it was Kennedy who did the heavy lifting on the child insurance bill: finding a Republican cosponsor in Utah Senator Orrin Hatch; raising money to run ads to battle the tobacco lobby; and going to war with Republican Senate leaders and the Clinton White House, when necessary, to win passage of a $24 billion health care program for uninsured children.

Mostly Kerry is more interested in the titles of his bills than the actual guts of the legislation," says Weld's campaign spokesman, Rob Gray, now a GOP consultant. "He worked on bills that sounded good in press releases and gave him good media, and then moved on to the next thing."

Two years later, in 1998, while contemplating a race for the presidency in 2000, Kerry made a boat-rocking speech on education reform, blasting policy makers and educators for "giving up on the vast majority of our children before we've even joined the real fight" and endorsing several proposals offered by critics of public education, including using federal financial pressure to end the tenure system that gives teachers job security.

But when the Senate took up President Bush's "No Child Left Behind Act" in 2001, it was Kennedy and Senator Joseph Lieberman, a Democrat from Connecticut, who played the leading roles, laboring in the trenches when the bill moved through the chamber.

All of this comes from The Boston Globe, At the center of power, seeking the summit. By John Aloysius Farrell, Globe Staff, 6/21/2003

[NewYorkerfromMass]

1. Ha ha, Kerry's is bullet proof and shatter resistant

and that was a mere pebble you hurled. Try again with more substance.

[9119495]

2. This from someone so frequently enraged

by Dean's "hypocrisy." So much for credibility.

[blm]

3. On Affirmative Action, Kerry wanted the LEGAL language fixed

to prevent the GOP from picking it apart through court cases. That's what Bill Clinton meant by saying "Mend it don't end it." Anyone should be happy about tightening the legal language to PRESERVE AA against the onslaught from the GOP.

Kerry helped craft the CHIPS bill and then Hatch latched onto it AFTER most of the work was done, and automatically pushed Kerry aside as Hatch was from the majority party. The story was spun against Kerry by a GOP operative. Shouldn't that have been an alert?

[SlavesandBulldozers]

4. for some reason i feel compelled

to state that I would vote for an epileptic aphid larva over george bush.

i hate seeing people post anti-democrat postings. it seems to me they come at the expense of posting positive comments about whoever the poster considers best fit for the job.

oh, and the quote from a GOP operative - who gives his opinion of Kerry. priceless. That's like asking Shaun Hannity to give us a journalistic account of H.R.C.

[AP]

5. Clip of John Kerry on Tavis Smiley:

http://discover.npr.org/features/feature.jhtml?wfId=949868

[Feanorcurufinwe]

6. For some reason (smile) you decided not to post the link to your source.

It is well known that the Boston Globe is the most anti-Kerry publication in America. So it is no surprise that their seven part series on John Kerry included every negative thing that could possibly be said about him. But for all of that, it is still highly informative, and I would encourage anyone who wants to learn about JK to read the whole thing.

Part One:
A privileged youth, a taste for risk

Part Two:
Heroism, growing concern over war

Part Three:
With antiwar role, high visibility

Part Four:
First campaign ends in defeat

Part Five:
Taking one prize, then a bigger one

Part Six:
With probes, making his mark

Part Seven:
At center of power, seeking summit

Here's a passage from Part Seven that you didn't choose to quote:

From there, "it kind of segued into John and I talking about Vietnam," McCain remembers. Deep into the night, as the plane droned over the Atlantic, Kerry and McCain revisited the defining experience of their lives. Says Kerry, "I asked a lot of questions about him, and he of me, and we talked about how he felt about his war, and my war."

In the ensuing weeks and months, McCain and Kerry individually, and then together, concluded that the unresolved divisions of the Vietnam War were causing too much national anguish, and that it was time to put the war to rest.

Four years later, on a summer day in 1995, Kerry and McCain stood beside President Clinton in the East Room at the White House as he announced that the United States would normalize diplomatic relations with Vietnam. For a president who most famously had not served in their war, the two combat veterans served as wingmen.
http://www.boston.com/globe/nation/packages/kerry/062103.shtml

[cindyw]

7. All interpretation. Don't you love it when a writer can only quote a word

from the time in order to say how a person felt. For example.

"in 1994, Kerry announced that he was "delighted" by the Republican takeover of Congress."

Show me where Kerry actually said that. All they could quote was delighted. He may have made a glass half full statement alluding to using a bad situation as an opportunity to change the prevailing winds in his party. This is from that hatchet job in the Globe.

You know how you tell a hatchet job. They use few quotes.