Boston Globe: Kerry's skills on display in Mideast trip

[Pirate Smile]

Senator John F. Kerry is reemerging on the public stage this week with a 13-day fact-finding trip through the Middle East, which supporters say shows that the Massachusetts Democrat is determined to maintain a high profile after his losing presidential campaign.

"He intends to play a prominent role in foreign and domestic policy, and this is clear evidence of this," said Philip W. Johnston, chairman of the Massachusetts Democratic Party. "The fact that his first major public outing following the election relates to Iraq and foreign policy tells us that he intends to be a strong spokesperson on those issues."

Kerry arrived in Amman, Jordan, yesterday and has planned a hectic itinerary, with stops scheduled in Iraq, Kuwait, Syria, Egypt, Israel, and the West Bank. He has meetings set up with a wide range of specialists, local leaders, and military commanders, as well as troops from Massachusetts, said April Boyd, a Kerry spokeswoman.

-snip-
Kerry is the only elected official on his trip, and he is making an unusual number of stops in the Middle East, suggesting that he wants to go beyond the sometimes-scripted events planned by the Bush administration. Foreign trips are fairly typical for members of Congress -- a large number of House and Senate members are making trips to Iraq in the run-up to the Jan. 30 elections there -- but Kerry insisted on charting his own course for his trip. He is making stops in Israel and its occupied territories, as well as other Middle Eastern nations.
http://www.boston.com/news/politics/president/kerry/articles/2005/01/04/kerrys_skills_on_display_in_mideast_trip/

[radric]

1. Should have displayed better skills..

when he was a candidate and maybe Dubya would have gotten an early retirement back to Crawford.

[comradebillyboy]

13. too true

nt

[loudsue]

16. radric and comradebillyboy.....Kerry did a FINE job as a candidate...

THAT is why he WON THE ELECTION by a wide margin. If not for the fraud, you would have seen this.

Sheesh! How many times do people have to point this out for you to finally GET IT???

:kick::kick:

[ginnyinWI]

26. Kerry did get more votes,

but smirkyboy has unscrupulous friends in high places. Without them he never would have left the ranch. He's had his way greased for him his whole life. Daddy's friends and Daddy's money. (smirk-smirk.)No need to actually develop any moral principles or grow a backbone. I believe that when you don't have any standards except for love of power and wealth, that makes you by definition--evil.

[rox63]

2. Here's the link to article

Check out the whole article at this link.

http://www.boston.com/news/politics/president/kerry/articles/2005/01/04/kerrys_skills_on_display_in_mideast_trip?mode=PF

[Pirate Smile]

3. whoops - I just forgot to include it. I'll add it to the top.

[Pirate Smile]

4. dupe

[forintegrity]

5. Good for him!

Go Johnny, go, go!

[GOPBasher]

6. That's cool, but

I really don't want him to run in 2008. I think we can have many, many candidates who are much better.

[NewYorkerfromMass]

8. Good luck finding them. nt

[GOPBasher]

9. You don't think we have good potential candidates?

I think we do: Clark, Richardson, Rendell, Warner, Governor of Illinois who's name I can's spell, Edwards, and even Gore.

[THUNDER HANDS]

15. i think he should step into the primaries

if anyone can beat him, good for them, if not, John has proven he's the best man for the job.

[FreeStateDemocrat]

7. Many people don’t want him to run so he has a huge challenge....

to change a lot of people’s minds in the next four years. The first thing he has to do is totally smack down the Swift Boat baggage that will follow him into 2008 or he can forget about even being mentioned.

[radric]

10. Personally I hope he forgets about 2008..

he ran a campaign against possibly the worst President to ever sit in the Oval Office and he flat out blew it. Waffling (I hate to give the Bushites any credit but it's true) on positions, votes, no clear difference between him and Bush. Argghhh... the list goes on and on. The perfect opportunity to unseat Bush and we select Kerry. Dean may have been a little wild at times but at least you knew where he stood. I'd rather have lost with a fiery Dean than a passive Kerry. My .02..

[calimary]

11. Sigh - I know how you feel.

What galled me (and believe me, I worked my ass off for Kerry) was how he let the swifties have center stage without responding (good Lord, don't they know about rapid response BY NOW?) AND he painted himself into a big, fat corner with the "I voted for the 87 billion before I voted against it". Jerk. He wasn't born yesterday. He should have known that gave an opening the size of the Holland Tunnel to the bad guys and they weren't above exploiting it - the way he let their stupid things slide without making hay from them. Besides, do you know how many times I've now seen that embarrassing soundbite in year-end retrospectives? Any idiot could have predicted that would happen. He will never live it down, and frankly, he deserves not to live it down.

I'm tired of having nice, polite, fair-minded gentlemen running on our side and everybody saying we have to take the high road. The high road gets us back here in the crappy seats up in the nosebleed section. We've seen it election after election that politics is dirty business and only the dirty players win. And unfortunately, it's all about winning because if you don't win, you don't govern.

What REALLY pisses me off is the milquetoast fight his side put up about all the voter fraud. He only just got around to weighing in on that one, so far after the fact that it was a joke. And this, from a guy who promised repeatedly to fight for every vote. I've seen more fight out of my cat with a rubber band.

I totally agree with you about Dean. At least you knew where he stood. Wasn't that one of the prime buzz-phrases from the bushies? "You may not agree with me but you know where I stand"? Well, people like (AND VOTE FOR) "straight talkers" - even perceived ones who are as phony as bush, because it sounds good. Dean was a straight talker. And he'd be president-elect by now.

[MADem]

12. We have to fix the voting machines

We have to find the fraud and expose it. Otherwise, it doesn't matter how people vote. The counters of the votes will game the total to benefit the GOP.

[ginnyinWI]

27. Rove was all set to eat Dean alive--couldn't wait!

They had some of the first ads mapped out. They were going to cast him as a flip-flopper! It's true--read it in the special Newsweek that came out just after the election.

[leftchick]

14. LOL! "Sometimes scripted bush events"?!?

every fucking thing he does is scripted for crying out loud! He probably needs to be told how to wipe his ass and when every day! Maybe that is why pickles always has that insane smile on her face.

[ginnyinWI]

28. if I were her I'd be on Prozac or something. geeze. n/t

[zann725]

17. And WHY is he not in D.C. this week...where HIS people need him?

Though I'm thrilled he thinks of the people of other nations first...as long as Shrub is in office, JK will have LITTLE if NO say in any Shrub (non-negotiatiable) policies. Come on, the Dem's are locked out of most private Repug meetings.

I still like ya, John...and want to believe. But we need you HERE...NOW...at HOME. Time is of the essence...to those of us who are not Millionaires. And by the way, that's most of us.

[ginnyinWI]

29. no--election fraud isn't about him, it's about us voters.

Let John Kerry be John Kerry: in whatever capacity he can, he'll work for us.
If we can get him into the WH, all the better. It can't be from him and still come with any sort of a mandate. See?

[Just Me]

18. Impressive. He's actually "analyzing" the situation.

The neoCONimperialist foreign policy has so screwed up our place in international stability.

It's quite exceptional that John Kerry is taking the initiative to collect information and analyze it, hopefully leading to a path which will get us out of the neoCONimperialist mess!!!

[davidinalameda]

19. wind surfing and duck hunting?

those skills?

[ginnyinWI]

30. No the other ones---

The skills he used to break open the Iran-Contra scandal & bust Ollie North, uncover the CIA's illegal backing of Noriega in Panama, and expose the criminal BCCI, which was illegally trafficking in drugs and laundering money for terrorists in Pakistan, implicating several U.S. governmental agencies (and the Bush family)in the process! Those skills!!!

Let's see YOU do that.

[grasswire]

20. I urge you all...

...to read this article over at American Prospect -- it gives a whole new historical and demographic perspective on candidate picking and why any "Greater New Englander" (God bless them) will likely lose. No matter Kerry's personal attributes, he could not win and it was sheer folly to nominate him.

Really. It's good reading for serious politicos. Here's a clip:

The model for a regionally diverse majority coalition of Democrats should be the Lincoln Republicans between the 1860s and the 1930s. Lincoln Republicans were able to build upon their core constituency in Greater New England to construct a national majority that lasted, with a few interruptions, from the end of Reconstruction to the New Deal. They did so by adding many Jacksonian populists in the border South and Midwest to their political base of former Whigs in the Northeast.

There is no equivalent in today’s American politics to the question of slavery in the territories, which united former Whigs and Jacksonian populists in the 1850s. But contemporary parallels can be found for western homestead legislation. Northeastern elites had long opposed the populist idea of free land in the West for settlers. Lincoln and his allies, however, made what became the Homestead Act of 1865 part of the Republican platform, beginning the often-stormy marriage of midwestern agrarians with northeastern industrial and financial elites that endured until the 1930s. The equivalent of the Homestead Act today might be legislation designed to help the suburban working class in the red states to own the contemporary equivalent of productive farms -- investment capital. “Universal capitalism” is a populist goal that conservatives have cleverly exploited in the name of the “ownership society,” at the same time that the right has manipulated the populist suspicion of income-redistribution programs for the poor. The Democratic Party should make the populist idea of universal capitalism its own.

The Democratic Party should also try to emulate the Lincoln Republicans by drawing on midwesterners as their presidential candidates. The successes of Carter and Clinton were possible only because the South was still in transition from the Democrats to the Republicans. But Al Gore was no more capable of carrying his home state of Tennessee in 2000 than John Edwards was of carrying North Carolina in 2004.

For Democrats today, the Midwest is the key to the White House, for the same reason it was crucial a century ago: Its location at the confluence of the major cultural regions of the United States means that its politicians must appeal to more than one tradition. During the era when it was the party supported by Greater New England, from 1868 to 1932, the Republican Party sent only two New England presidents to the White House: Chester A. Arthur and Calvin Coolidge, both from Vermont. Of the 11 Republican presidents during this era, seven -- Ulysses Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield, William Henry Harrison, William McKinley, William Howard Taft, and Warren Harding -- were from Ohio. Democratic talent scouts should be eyeing midwestern governors.


http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewPrint&articleId=8954

[Just Me]

21. Okay. Do as the Bushes did,...MOVE SOUTH *LOL*!!!! n/t

[grasswire]

22. did you read the article?

huh?

did you?

[Just Me]

23. I confess,...I had not.

I scanned over it. I'll earmark it for a closer read later.

Okay?

[goforit]

24. Watching his cowardness in contesting the vote.... Lieberman is equal

[IndianaGreen]

25. When is Kerry going to disavow his endorsement of Bush's ME policies?

That should be step one in the reinvention of John Kerry. I submit as evidence exhibit one:

MEET THE PRESS

Sunday, April 18, 2004

GUEST: Sen. John Kerry, D-MA, presidential candidate

MODERATOR/PANELIST: Tim Russert, NBC News

MR. RUSSERT: On Thursday, President Bush broke with the tradition and policy of six predecessors when he said that Israel can keep part of the land seized in the 1967 Middle East War and asserted the Palestinian refugees cannot go back to their particular homes. Do you support President Bush?

SEN. KERRY: Yes.

MR. RUSSERT: Completely?

SEN. KERRY: Yes.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4772030

[ginnyinWI]

31. sorry he doesn't reinvent himself for political reasons. n/t

[IndianaGreen]

33. Then he is doomed as a candidate for 2008!

His endorsement of Bush's policies is the most pathetic example of pandering to the most extreme elements of the Likud government.

[GetTheRightVote]

32. The more I learn about John Kerry, the more I get to like him

I think the man starts to grow on you after alittle while but I do believe he would make a very good President. Also, I believe he is my elected President right at this moment. Atleast now I know I would want him there because I believe in him not just as a replacement for Bush. That has to be a good point to be at even for me.

:kick: