Kerry? God I hope not. - Democratic Underground

Clem

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Fri Feb-06-04 03:42 PM
Original message

Kerry? God I hope not.

This is a post from Dean for America blog, and I think it deserves a mention.

If John Kerry is nominated, I believe we might as well just write off both the election and the party as a whole. Even assuming Kerry can win the general election, we will have gained something far less than the greatest possible result. Kerry has time and again demonstrated himself to be an opportunistic hypocrite who will say and do anything to get elected, and then promptly drop it afterwards.

He threw someone else's medals up the capital steps in the famous Vietnam protest. His medals hang on the walls of his senate office, trotted out and run up the flag poll like no honest veteran ever would. In the last fifteen years, he has collected more special interest money than any other senator, regardless of party, yet now, inspired by Dean's meteoric rise in the polls, rails against them in every speech. More and more information is surfacing about unethical gifts and favors he has accepted and given.

Look at Kerry's record. Has he ever stood up for us when we needed him most, when it wasn't popular to do so? Has he any great accomplishments to his name, other than surviving three superficial wounds in Vietnam and then halfheartedly protesting the war and calling his fellow soldiers evildoers?

Kerry's senate record is one of blatant opportunism. He has voted with Ted Kennedy 93% of the time (when he actually did show up for votes), is an ardent supporter of gun control, voted against the first gulf war when there were more than enough reason for our involvement, and was the epitome of a Massachusetts liberal until races got too close for comfort or when he decided to run for president within the last few years.

When he thinks it's popular, he flees from his past record and imitates the Republicans. In his 1998 senate race against Bill Weld, he made standardized testing, school accountability, and an anti-NEA message the overriding theme of his campaign. Once he got elected, however, it was completely forgotten. More recently, he voted FOR the Patriot Act, FOR the unilateral preemptive war in Iraq, and FOR the No Child Left Behind Act, but then after Dean proved it was popular to do so, railed against all three on the campaign trail. He didn't even participate in 33 of the 38 votes on the recent Medicare act which he now assails. Kerry only began speaking up for people after Dean's campaign eroded his base of support to virtually nothing. Now he talks the talk, but how can we trust him to fight the good fight when he has never given all of his energy to it and put everything on the line for it ever before in his life. "The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in the moments of comfort and convenience," as Martin Luther King Jr. so famously said, "but where he stands in times of challenge and controversy."

John Forbes Kerry is Just For Kerry, and if this party nominates him, we will lose more than just an election. He stands for nothing and no one but his own election, none of his positions are beyond compromise if they interfere with that goal. We will lose our purpose in the general election by selling our collective soul to the hollow devil of electability. We simply cannot afford to just nominate a candidate. I want to nominate a president worthy of the job and our unwavering support.

We have in Howard Dean a rare and unique opportunity to elect a truly great man to office at a time when this country most needs his special kind of greatness. He is a man beholden to no one save his own conscience and we the people. He is a man able to look at complex situations and quickly arrive at an accurate diagnosis and a logical solution. He is a man unafraid to say what has to be said, when it is time to say it, regardless of whether he thinks we want to hear it - for all his supposed gaffes, has he really actually been wrong? He has quite literally put his life on the line, withstanding death threats and being forced to wear a bulletproof vest while campaigning in 2000, for the rights of people he has no personal connection to because he believes that the cause of equality is a just one. He has built a campaign in the spirit of the American dream, a campaign of by and for the people, financed with donations averaging just over one hundred dollars from over three hounded thousand people, like you and I. We are Howard Dean's special interests, each and every one of us.

I beg you, for the future of this country, do not throw away this historic opportunity. If we agree that the ascendancy of the far right has caused significant damage to the values and institutions we hold dear, we must nominate the man most capable of righting those wrongs and restoring this country to health. That is why, until, as Bill Clinton once put it, the last dog dies, I will fight with all my strength to ensure that the right man gets the nomination of our party, and not just the most convenient.

Sean Robertson (apparently he couldn't finish his whole post)