Rivals Mine Kerry Senate Years For Material to Slow Him Down

I guess the last paragraph of this two pager was tacked on to make it fair and balanced.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/25/politics/campaign/25RECO.html?ex=1075611600&en=aa6bb0d93d9ed6de&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE

WASHINGTON, Jan. 24 — The moment John Kerry began to seem like the candidate to watch in the Iowa caucuses, the campaigns of his Democratic rivals Howard Dean and Richard A. Gephardt swiftly used a handful of Mr. Kerry's decade-old Senate votes and statements against ethanol and agricultural subsidies to attack him as not supportive of Iowa's essential industry.

Now that his opponents are moving even more aggressively to slow Mr. Kerry's rise, his 19-year voting record as the junior senator from Massachusetts could loom as his greatest political vulnerability, among Democrats and Republicans alike. The sheer length of Mr. Kerry's service means that he has built a paper trail of positions on education, the military, intelligence and other issues — stands that might have looked one way when he took them but that resonate differently now.

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For example, at the end of the cold war, Mr. Kerry advocated scaling back the Central Intelligence Agency, but after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, he complained about a lack of intelligence capability. In the 1980's, he opposed the death penalty for terrorists who killed Americans abroad, but he now supports the death penalty for terrorist acts. In the 1990's, he joined with Republican colleagues to sponsor proposals to end tenure for public school teachers and allow direct grants to religion-based charities, measures that many Democratic groups opposed. In 1997, he voted to require elderly people with higher incomes to pay a larger share of Medicare premiums.

The record is susceptible to two broad strands of attack. Mr. Kerry's rival Democrats point to a series of shifting stands on issues, like his qualified praise for the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress and his vote authorizing President Bush to use force in Iraq. They say these are are at odds with his campaign claim to be the "real deal" Democratic alternative to Mr. Bush, capable of "standing up for people and taking on powerful interests," as he says in his stump speech.

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and Kerry beat him soundly.

you're eventually going to have votes that conflict with eachother.

That's why Dean and Clark can make charges like that and Kerry can't say anything about them.

Dean and Clark aren't legislators, so they don't vote on ANYTHING.

is being touted as a really *good thing* by some of the campaigns and a lot of posters. This to me is one of the most fantastic thing about the Bushification of politics.

And if Kerry does respond to the "woulda, shoulda, coulda" charges, it is considered "negative campaigning."

Hat's off to you, Magic Rat!

:yourock: