The Republican Plan of attack against Kerry [View All]

[ringmastery]

Good article describing the areas the republicans will likely criticize Kerry on. Good to know his potential weaknesses and plan accordingly for the attacks.

http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?pt=6PSFCm6m%2BOxpLbMfiXVyVZ%3D%3D

In all likelihood, they would hammer Kerry for his opposition to mandatory minimum sentences for dealers who sell drugs to children and for voting against the death penalty for terrorists. They would mock his efforts to provide cash benefits to drug addicts and alcoholics, and his onetime opposition to a modest work requirement for welfare recipients. They would trash him for supporting more than half a trillion dollars in tax increases-including hikes in gas taxes and Social Security taxes on ordinary Americans-while accepting free housing and other goodies for himself from friendly influence-peddlers. They would even point out that, when Kerry served as lieutenant governor under one Michael S. Dukakis, Massachusetts famously furloughed more than 500 murderers and sex offenders under a program Kerry later defended as tough.

In fact, they already have.

In 1996, Republican Governor William Weld ran an aggressive campaign for Kerry's Massachusetts Senate seat, blasting him as a soft-on-crime, soft-on-welfare, crazed-on-taxes paleoliberal. He accused Kerry of siding with murderers and junkies over victims and taxpayers; he ran one ad with the slogan: "free rent for kerry. higher taxes for us."

It didn't quite work. Weld was the wrong guy, 1996 was the wrong year, and Massachusetts was the wrong state for a chest-thumping, red-meat, ditch-the-wuss conservative message. Kerry relentlessly linked Weld to the Republican bogeymen Newt Gingrich, Trent Lott, and Bob Dole, energizing his state's powerful labor unions and yellow-dog Democratic establishment, and he managed to escape with a seven-point victory in a state where Bill Clinton thrashed Dole by 34 points. But George W. Bush is not Bill Weld, 2004 is not 1996, and the United States most assuredly is not Massachusetts.