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Bush 'Flip-Flop' Ads Will Damage Kerry

Tuesday, March 09, 2004

By Dick Morris

It is increasingly clear that President Bush's line of attack against John Kerry will be to describe him as a flip-flopping politician, changing his positions constantly to suit the political needs of the moment. One negative ad, previewed on "Meet the Press," showed an animation of two John Kerry boxers battling one another. The winner? George W. Bush.

The obvious goal of the Bush attack is to discredit Kerry and make it hard for anyone to believe in him or anything he says. But this round of flip-flop attacks is just the precursor of the main Bush offensive. Attacking Kerry for reversing himself on many key issues will weaken the Democrat, but the real point is to soften him up for two more deadly attacks likely to follow.

First, the flip-flop ads are designed to make Kerry appear too weak to lead America through the tough challenges of terrorism at home and abroad. Attacking a candidate for reversing himself on key political issues is the best way to make him appear weak, indecisive and vacillating.

When I worked for President Bill Clinton, the Republicans tried the same tactic, constantly citing his frequent reversals on issues to demonstrate weakness. Their barbs were very effective and led to a White House policy of never, never, never reversing a stand on anything.

(Sometimes, White House staff liberals took advantage of this axiom to leak word that Clinton was about to take a liberal position so as to foreclose him from doing anything else for fear of it seeming to be a flip-flop. During the welfare-reform debate, after Clinton had privately decided to sign a waiver to let Wisconsin move ahead with the work requirements and time limits its Legislature had adopted, some White House staffers leaked that he had decided to veto it instead. Terrified of seeming to flip on the issue, Clinton eventually backed off the Wisconsin proposal but then signed a national welfare-reform law. )

Bush wants to show that Kerry is too weak to lead the nation as a wartime president. It is no accident that Bush is opening his paid media campaign by reminding voters of his strong stance in the months after 9/11. He wants to raise the saliency of terrorism as an issue and to up the ante for the strength required of a chief executive. The flip-flop ads are his way of doing it.

By showing the Democrat as a man who can be pushed first one way and then the other by political winds, he shows him to be far from the strong, decisive leader America needs.

The flip-flop attack is also designed to prevent Kerry from responding to the other key line of Bush attack - that Kerry is too liberal for mainstream America.

By criticizing Kerry for changing his position constantly, the Bush campaign hopes to stop their opponent from wriggling out of his previous liberal votes and views. Once the public is alert to the chance that Kerry will change his mind, it becomes harder for the Democrat to explain away his votes and to move to the center under Bush's fire.

Now, when Bush moves in for the kill and accuses Kerry of opposing the Defense of Marriage Act or appropriations to fund the Iraq War, the Democratic candidate will find it harder to spin his positions and to move to the middle on these issues. When he tries, voters will repeat to themselves the Ronald Reagan criticism of Jimmy Carter: "There you go again."

By showing Kerry to flip-flop, Bush sets him up for the real charges - that he is too weak and too liberal to be president.

Conventional wisdom says that this election is going to be close, a replay of 2000. It need not be so. If Bush runs aggressive national advertisements, hammering at these themes, he can put this race away by the end of the spring.

We must remember that Bush's father trailed Mike Dukakis by 17 points in the months before the conventions. Until Bush Sr. ran negative ads, it seemed that the Massachusetts governor would be Reagan's successor. Kerry's bubble may prove to be just that fragile.

Mickey Kaus has been rather obsessively bitching out Kerry for the same thing for weeks now, over on Slate

www.kausfiles.com

I don't know what's worse -- a "flip-flopper" or someone who insists their policies are right even when all the evidence indicates the opposite. Yeah, the tax cuts have turned the economy into an unstoppable job-generating machine, and Iraq was vital to the "war on terror." Et cetera, et cetera.

Didn't someone once say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different result?

Of course, no such analysis can be that facile. Bush has done his share of flip-flopping: on the desirability of nation-building, on the need for a Homeland Security department, on the need for an independent 9/11 commission, on gay marriage, on why we attacked Iraq. Et cetera, et cetera.

Hell, Bush flips when he shouldn't, and fails to flop when he should. He can't even flip-flop right.

If Kerry's learned anything from '88, which he insists he has, it's not to take these attacks lying down. If he lets this sort of shallow attack beat him, he doesn't deserve to win.

Ryan

Didn't Bush I try this with Clinton?

More on Kerry...

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/04067/281704.stm

Jack Kelly: A record to regret

Kerry's positions are consistently depressing

Sunday, March 07, 2004

Sen. John F. Kerry opposed -- famously -- the Vietnam War. His opposition to that conflict was so intense that he marched in demonstrations under the flag of the enemy, and falsely accused his fellow Vietnam veterans of routinely committing grisly war crimes.

Kerry also opposed aid to El Salvador when that country was being attacked by Marxist guerrillas, and aid to the Contras, who -- with U.S. help -- ultimately freed Nicaragua from a communist dictatorship. Kerry denounced the liberation of Grenada after a bloody Marxist coup there as "a bully's show of force," though he says now he didn't oppose the U.S. intervention.

Kerry voted against the liberation of Kuwait after Saddam Hussein invaded that country in 1990. Kerry also voted against lifting the arms embargo on Bosnia when that country was being attacked by Serbs allied with Yugoslav dictator Slobodan Milosevic. Though Kerry voted for the 2002 resolution authorizing the United States to go to war with Iraq, he now says Operation Iraqi Freedom was a mistake.

In his youth, Kerry said U.S. armed forces should be placed under the control of the United Nations. More recently, he has said the United States should not have gone to war without U.N. permission. This record has caused some to wonder if there could ever be a circumstance where a President Kerry would use American military power without seeking Kofi Annan's permission first.

We now have an answer. In a meeting with the New York Daily News on Feb. 28, Kerry said he would have sent troops to Haiti even without international support to quell a popular uprising against (now deposed) President Jean Bertrand Aristide.

"I would intervene with the international community, and absent an international force, I'd do it unilaterally," Kerry said.

A U.S. intervention to protect Aristide would have had to be unilateral, because even the French recognized that the wildly unpopular president was the principal cause of Haitian unrest. "He does not belong in office. He has no legitimacy," an official in the French foreign ministry told NewsMax Feb. 28. A day earlier, French Foreign Minister Dominque de Villepin was pushing Aristide toward the door: "It is for President Aristide, who bears a heavy responsibility in the current situation, to draw the consequences of the impasse," de Villepin told a Haitian delegation on Feb. 27.

The upsurge in violence in Haiti that prompted the U.S., French and Canadian intervention there had come mostly from thugs allied with Aristide, the French official said.

"Aristide was trying to use [a U.S. proposed agreement to share power] to force a contingent of international police to come to Haiti and save him from the rebels. It would not work," the French official said.

A renegade Catholic priest turned Marxist, Aristide was elected president in 1990 in the closest thing Haiti has ever had to a fair election, but deposed a year later in a coup led by his security chief. President Clinton sent 20,000 U.S. troops to Haiti in 1994 to restore Aristide to power.

But Aristide proved to be typical of the "one man, one vote, one time" syndrome that has plagued the region. Re-elected in 2000 in elections considered fraudulent by the United Nations and the Organization of American States, Aristide put his thugs in charge of the police and used them to intimidate political opponents. Much of the aid provided by the United States and international organizations found its way into his pockets, and those of his cronies. Once bound by a vow of poverty, Aristide became Haiti's richest man.

The wild celebrations throughout Haiti upon Aristide's departure indicate that had we intervened militarily to prop him up, we'd have had to fight most of the country. Yet this is the one instance where John Kerry would unilaterally use military force.

Kerry would not intervene in Iraq to overthrow a tyrant who was a danger to the United States. But he would intervene in Haiti to prop up a tyrant who was an enemy of the United States. There is a depressing consistency in this.

Kerry would not intervene in Iraq to overthrow a tyrant who was a danger to the United States.

He wasn't a danger. That's the point.

The wild celebrations throughout Haiti upon Aristide's departure indicate that had we intervened militarily to prop him up, we'd have had to fight most of the country.

Oh, please. There are wild celebrations in Haiti everytime there's a coup. Then whoever gets in power turns out to be a thug, they get kicked out, and there are more wild celebrations. If the Haitians put half the effort into self-government that they do into their wild celebrations, they'd be much better off.

That said, I wouldn't have unilaterally sent in troops to prop up Aristide, either -- by all accounts he probably deserved to get ripped apart by a mob. If that's what Kerry said, then Kerry's wrong. But at the same time, I wouldn't have covertly supported a bunch of Duvalier leftovers, wannabes, drug runners and mass murderers, and then overtly supported them by pushing Aristide out, either. It's just this sort of "support whatever thugs seem most compliant at the time" policy that has Haiti (and Iraq and Afghanistan and...) where it is today.

Not to mention that Jack Kelly never met a military intervention he didn't like. The fact that he uses NewsMax as a source speaks for itself.

Ryan