Kerry Forgot His Lines

Democrats in Self-Destruct Mode CCCLXXXVIII

Will this turn out to have been Kerry's equivalent of Dukakis's answer to the wife-rape question?

Bill Kristol explains (ellipses in original).

"We're all God's children, Bob. And I think if you were to talk to Dick Cheney's daughter, who is a lesbian, she would tell you that she's being who she was, she's being who she was born as."
—John Kerry, responding to Bob Schieffer's question,
"Do you believe homosexuality is a choice?"
in the third debate, October 13, 2004

"I said it in a very respectful way about their love of their daughter.... I was saying it in a way that embraced the love of their daughter.... All I was trying to do is point out that it — let their daughter speak. Was it a choice, or was she born the way she was? That was the question. I was being respectful, purely respectful."
—John Kerry, quoted in the Des Moines Register, October 15, 2004

Was John Kerry born a shameless and ruthless opportunist, or did he choose to become one? In a way, who cares? Who knows how John Kerry became who he is? What is clear is that he is, as Dick Cheney put it, "a man who will do and say anything to get elected." And what is equally clear is that he shouldn't be elected president of the United States.

Leave aside the cheap, cold, calculating cynicism — and cruelty — in Kerry's appropriation of the alleged opinions of an opposing candidate's family member to try to embarrass his opponent. Leave aside the view Kerry and his campaign must have of millions of religious Americans if they think this particular McCarthyite moment will work. Leave aside their fear of having an honest debate about a legitimate public policy issue — same-sex marriage, the role of liberal judges in advancing it, and the proper response of the elected representatives of the American people. Leave aside the fact that Kerry's alleged opposition to same-sex marriage is manifestly dishonest and cowardly.

Leave it all aside. How stupid does John Kerry think the American people are?

Does he really think they will believe that he singled out Mary Cheney because he "was trying to say something positive about the way strong families deal with this issue?" Does he think they will accept his claim that he was saying something about the Cheneys' "love of their daughter"? Of course, he wasn't. In his answer, he never mentioned or came close to mentioning the Cheney family, or the Cheneys' love. He merely brought up Mary Cheney as a lesbian, out of left field, in order to get her name and sexual orientation into an answer where no such citation was expected, called for, or remotely appropriate. His campaign manager let slip the truth when after the debate she told Fox News's Chris Wallace that Mary Cheney was "fair game."

Kerry's desperate attempt at next-day spin was also revealing. It showed the way he had been supposed to bring up Mary Cheney — the way he and his staff had planned to pull off this maneuver. Kerry was supposed to do what his more skilled and cleverer debating partner, John Edwards, did. He was supposed to sugarcoat his use of Mary Cheney more effectively. Edwards prefaced his answer to Gwen Ifill's same-sex marriage question in the vice-presidential debate with, "Let me say first that I think the vice president and his wife love their daughter. I think they love her very much. And you can't have anything but respect for the fact that they're willing to talk about the fact that they have a gay daughter; the fact that they embrace her is a wonderful thing."

But Kerry forgot his lines. And while Cheney had to pretend to accept Edwards's phony, condescending compliment, and everyone else allowed Edwards's deftly exploitative comment go by, Kerry's appropriation of Mary Cheney came in no such lawyerly and sugary packaging. The rawness of his ruthlessness was there for all to see. The Democrats are terrified of a debate on same-sex marriage, and used Mary Cheney to try to brush back the Bush-Cheney ticket from forcing a real policy debate.

No one would blame President Bush for hesitating to engage in such a full-bore debate, partly because he undoubtedly wants to avoid further awkwardness for his running mate and his family. But the rest of the country doesn't have to be intimidated by John Kerry's McCarthyism. They should punish him for it — and also remember that when they vote on November 2, they are choosing between two candidates who have very different social, moral, and cultural outlooks. They should remember that Bush and Kerry will make very different judicial appointments, just as they took opposite stands on the Defense of Marriage Act, which sought to protect states from being forced to recognize other states' same-sex marriages, and on a constitutional amendment. This is a legitimate ground for choice — as is the character revealed by a candidate who did what John Kerry did, with malice aforethought, Wednesday night.

P.S. Bob Novak weighs in on this issue at the Chicago Sun-Times, today, and he says that it wasn't planned for Kerry to say anything at all about Mary Cheney.

John Kerry clearly felt he was riding high in the final presidential debate last week at Tempe, Ariz., when he impulsively and inexplicably noted that Vice President Dick Cheney's daughter Mary is a lesbian. That shocked politicians of both parties, focus group participants and just plain voters. What happened next could affect the outcome of the closely contested election for president.

The negative reaction by prominent Democrats was conveyed to the Kerry campaign plane with this recommendation: Apologize for any inadvertent insult. That received some support within Kerry's staff, but not much. The overwhelming sentiment was for no apology. Indeed, the hard language from principal Kerry surrogates described Mary Cheney as ''fair game'' and asserted that her mother is ashamed of her.

It's hard to believe that in the closing weeks of a campaign where great issues are debated, the sexuality of the vice president's daughter could be determinant. Still, overnight polling showed a sharp gain by George W. Bush. Whether this is coincidental or cause-and-effect is a subject for backstage political discussion in both parties.

Kerry campaign sources say there was no plan for Kerry to talk about Mary Cheney last Wednesday, and it never came up in the debate prep. Kerry's intimates say he was trying to compliment the Cheneys, but there is absolutely nothing complimentary in what he said. Many Republicans see a calculated plot to depress Bush's social conservative base by revealing the vice president's daughter as a lesbian. But her sexual orientation is such common knowledge on the right that the alleged Democratic plot would be foolish.

Rather, Kerry's comments appear to be spontaneous — and unpleasant. Faced with President Bush's answer in the debate that he did not know whether he believed ''homosexuality is a choice,'' Kerry blurted out they should go ask Mary Cheney, who ''would tell you that she's being who she was, she's being who she was born as.'' This sounded like an effort to impute hypocrisy on the part of an opponent seeking to ban gay marriage.

Democrats at debate-watching parties gasped in surprise. Wired focus group members across the country displayed an instant negative reaction. Old Democratic political hands, in disbelief, tried to convey their unhappiness to Kerry. Even Kerry's Republican friend, Sen. John McCain, publicly criticized the Democratic nominee.

The only Kerry aide on the plane who wanted him to quickly issue an apology for any perceived insult was senior adviser Mike McCurry, the former Clinton spokesman who is a calm, cool voice among the overheated Kerryites. McCurry was alone. The Kerry brain trust argued that the Bush people were even nastier, and this was no time to be soft.

Instead of an apology, the rhetoric escalated. Democrats outside the campaign were stunned by the words that followed. Kerry's usually serene campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill referred to Mary Cheney as ''fair game.'' The peak in meanness was attained by Elizabeth Edwards, the motherly wife of vice presidential nominee John Edwards. She contended the outburst against Kerry by Mary's mother, Lynne, ''indicates a certain degree of shame'' toward her daughter. It is difficult to exaggerate Lynne Cheney's outrage over Elizabeth Edwards' suggestion.

Most of the Kerry camp, desensitized by political combat, saw nothing wrong with all this. His aides could find fault only with Lynne Cheney because she was enraged by the sight of Kerry invoking her daughter's name and then professing to read Mary's mind and express her thoughts.

Overnight polls by several organizations last Thursday night indicated a little slip by Kerry replacing a virtual deadlock between the candidates that followed the first debate. Pollster John Zogby's nightly tracking last week for the first time showed a few Democrats moving from Kerry to Bush. When Mary Cheney was mentioned, ''soft Kerry'' voters at pollster Frank Luntz's Arizona debate focus group for the first time electronically indicated displeasure with the senator. It was a mistake by John Kerry, and it might well prove a serious one.

P.P.S Bill Safire also weighs in, today, and he thinks it was planned. (Ellipsis and italics in original.)

The memoir about the Kerry-Edwards campaign that will be the best seller will reveal the debate rehearsal aimed at focusing national attention on the fact that Vice President Cheney has a daughter who is a lesbian.

That this twice-delivered low blow was deliberate is indisputable. The first shot was taken by John Edwards, seizing a moderator's opening to smarmily compliment the Cheneys for loving their openly gay daughter, Mary. The vice president thanked him and yielded the remaining 80 seconds of his time; obviously it was not a diversion he was willing to prolong.

Until that moment, only political junkies knew that a member of the Cheney family serving on the campaign staff was homosexual. The vice president, to show it was no secret or anything his family was ashamed of, had referred to it briefly twice this year, but the press - respecting family privacy - had properly not made it a big deal. The percentage of voters aware of Mary Cheney's sexual orientation was tiny.

But Edwards's answer in the vice-presidential debate raised that percentage. Because Cheney refused to react and the media did not see the spotlight on lesbianism as part of a political plan, the opening shot worked.

Emboldened, members of Kerry's debate preparation team made Mary Cheney's private life the centerpiece of their answer to the question, especially worrisome to them, about same-sex marriage. Kerry was prepped to insert her sexuality into his rehearsed answer: "If you were to talk to Dick Cheney's daughter, who is a lesbian...."

But in this second time around, the gratuitous insertion of Cheney's daughter into an answer slipping around a hot-button social issue revealed that it was part of a deliberate Kerry campaign strategy.

One purpose was to drive a wedge between the Republican running mates. President Bush supports a constitutional amendment limiting marriage to a union of a man and a woman; Cheney has long been on record favoring state option, but always adds that the president sets administration policy. That rare divergence of views is hardly embarrassing.

The sleazier purpose of the Kerry-Edwards spotlight on Mary Cheney is to confuse and dismay Bush supporters who believe that same-sex marriage is wrong, to suggest that Bush is as "soft on same-sex" as Kerry is, and thereby to reduce a Bush core constituency's eagerness to go to the polls.

The pro-Kerry columnist Margaret Carlson put her finger on it, finding that Kerry and Edwards "realize that discussing Mary Cheney is a no-lose proposition: It highlights the hypocrisy of the Bush-Cheney position to Democrats while simultaneously alerting evangelicals to the fact that the Cheneys have an actual gay person in their household whom they apparently aren't trying to convert or cure." (Italics mine.)

After the outspoken Lynne Cheney blasted this unsought intrusion of her daughter's private life as "a cheap and tawdry trick," the Kerry campaign hustled forward John Edwards's wife to charge that such motherly outrage "indicates a certain degree of shame with respect to her daughter's sexual preferences."

Worse than insensitive, that shot was off message, peeling the veneer off the Kerry-Edwards justification for making Mary famous: their oleaginous claim that, gee, they were only complimenting Dick Cheney for his fatherly tolerance. The crusher to that pretense came when the Kerry campaign manager, Mary Beth Cahill, coolly announced that the Cheney daughter was "fair game."

Apparently the American public thinks otherwise about the campaigning children of candidates. When polls showed two-to-one disapproval of the calculated Kerry-Edwards abuse of the young woman's privacy, the Democratic strategists who concocted this base-suppressing dirty trick orchestrated a defense that it was Dick Cheney who "outed" his daughter months ago. They are advising Kerry that he would look weak or, worse, slyly manipulative were he to apologize for tagging the Cheneys with the word "lesbian" before 50 million viewers.

Kerry will, I hope, assert his essential decency by apologizing with sincerity. Other Republicans hope he will let his self-inflicted wound fester. They have in mind a TV spot using an old film clip of a Boston lawyer named Welch at a Congressional hearing, saying "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"

The Blog from the Core asserts Fair Use for non-commercial, non-profit educational purposes.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Mon. 10/18/04 07:08:52 AM
Categorized as Democrats in Self-Destruct Mode.