Kerryed Away
April 6th, 2008The Weekly Standard makes a fascinating proposal: John Kerry for Vice President on an Obama-led ticket. What reason do they give for resurrecting the dead from their watery grave off Cape Cod? The magazine believes he can add gravitas to an inexperienced ticket and they think he is a lot of fun to cover. Relatedly, John Kerry says Barack Obama won’t be swiftboated, and he’s right. The Republicans will have to find something else to destroy him with, and we’ll have to wait and see whether or not he’ll be able to mount an effective counter-attack.
Here’s an interesting question: was there a way to effectively handle Willie Horton, or the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth? Some people might think of Bill Clinton and the draft as well as Gennifer Flowers, to prove that candidates can counter seemingly-daunting charges, and that might be a good example (it was certainly the first thought that came to mind) but I also think it’s quite different than the first two because Horton killed a man and the Swift Boat Veterans alleged that Senator Kerry wasn’t half the man he claimed to be. The sex scandals are remedied by a confession that, hey, I’ve made mistakes and my wife and I have worked through them; the draft issue was one many American families could relate to, but beyond that most families didn’t want to sit around talking about such matters when the economy was a mess. But there are certain incidents that are simply impossible to survive, I think, and Swift Boats/Willie Horton might have been such.
I imagine that the Republicans are going through Weather Underground videos looking for shots of Bernadine Dohrn and Obama together, and I bet they’re going through Wright’s sermons with a fine-tooth comb to find a great attack to make. We’ll have to wait and see what they fire at him and how he counters it, but it’s impossible to know how someone will react to a punch until it’s been landed right on their kidneys. “Not God bless America — God damn America!” is going to be a vicious shot when the Republicans wind up and put their elephantine weight into it.