Feingold, Kerry & the 'Strategists'

[helderheid]

Years before Sen. John Kerry fell under the spell of national Democratic “strategists,” he believed that a Democrat’s best hope for winning the White House was to run as an insurgent. To overcome built-in Republican advantages, Kerry felt a Democrat had to show principle and challenge the status quo.

But Kerry had that thinking beat out of him. In the late 1980s, he got pummeled by the mainstream news media and the political establishment for exposing cocaine trafficking by Nicaraguan contra rebels and for embarrassing their Reagan-Bush patrons. Respectable Washington didn’t want to believe the ugly reality.

Mocked by the big newspapers and branded a “randy conspiracy buff” by Newsweek, Kerry was persuaded by party insiders that his political future required him to trim his sails and dump his rebelliousness overboard.

So, by the time he ran for president in 2004, Kerry was silent about his heroic investigations of the 1980s. He presented himself instead as a careful politician who spoke in a fog of nuance. Whenever he seemed poised to crush the bumbling George W. Bush, Kerry retreated into poll-tested platitudes.

As it turned out – as the younger Kerry would have understood – the greatest risk was to play it safe.

Much more:
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/031406.html

[helderheid]

1. no?

[wisteria]

2. Blah, Blah, Blah, trying to play down the importance of planning

and strategy. Senator Kerry has only refined his politics. I also disagree about his chances for running again- god the man didn't die, he ran a close campaign and lost. I will never ever count Kerry out. That is not his style.

Oh, and why no mention of Senator Kerry's well planned and orchestrated Alito filibuster? That was a bold maverick like move that actually gained more support than Feingold's actions.

[rodeodance]

5. Feingold was complaining of these 'strategists' today--how the Dems

were listening to them --the reason why they did not support him--but that he refused to do so. I had talked about this earlier (sorry, some post on DU--maybe Wa Post article on Feingold today).

[rodeodance]

8. yes, here is the article I posted earlier about the Dem 'strategists"

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/13/AR2006031301094_pf.html

Feingold Pushes to Censure President
Some Democrats Wary of Resolution On Wiretapping

By Charles Babington
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 14, 2006; A08

Democrats sharpened their attack yesterday on President Bush's warrantless surveillance of Americans, with a liberal senator introducing a censure resolution and party leaders showing a willingness to debate the matter.

Some party strategists, however, worried that voters will see the move as overreaching partisanship, and Republicans pounced, practically daring Democrats to vote for the measure. "The big question now," said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), "is how many of his Democrat colleagues will follow him over the cliff?"


....Several Democratic strategists said surveillance issues are not Bush's most vulnerable spot, and they fear the party may appear extremist. "It is more likely that a big censure fight would have the effect of rallying folks to his side," said one Democratic strategist and former Clinton aide. "While some in the Democratic base want retribution for what happened to Clinton," the adviser said, "I think there is a larger reluctance to try to remove people from office.".....

[rodeodance]

10. The message of the IP is that Dems are "playing it safe"-listening to

the strategists--and not sticking their necks out and standing by Feingold and the Censure Resolution.

[rodeodance]

13. article talks of how WPost article quotes these strategists.

......While Feingold’s proposal could be viewed as a moderate step – expressing congressional disapproval short of impeachment – Washington Post reporter Charles Babington searched out unnamed “Democratic strategists” to make Feingold’s plan look both craven and crazy.

“Some party strategists,” Babington wrote, “worried that voters will see the move as overreaching partisanship.” Then, going in the opposite direction, Babington quoted the strategists worrying that the real problem with Feingold’s initiative was that challenging Bush on abrogating the Fourth Amendment wasn’t the smartest partisan move.

“Several Democratic strategists said (illegal) surveillance issues are not Bush’s most vulnerable spot, and they fear the party may appear extremist,” Babington wrote.

The Post reporter then quoted a strategist, identified only as a former aide to President Bill Clinton, as saying, “It is more likely that a big censure fight would have the effect of rallying folks to his (Bush’s) side.”

[heirs_of_liberty]

22. Removing 'people' from office?

You mean like not trying Bush senior for perjury before Congress when he claimed to have never worked for the CIA mafia in the Zapata - Bay of Pigs catastrophe, nor for his and the CIA's apparent involvement and participation in the subsequent assassination of JFK?

You mean like not trying Bush senior, William Casey, Richard Secord, Oliver North and Albert Hakim for their parts in the willful murder of 8 US marines, killed by their criminal collusion and deliberate treasonous criminal sabotage of President Carter's Desert One hostage rescue plan?

You mean like not trying Bush sr. and Reagan for the Iran-Contra crimes?

You mean like not trying Bush senior and Reagan for his 'fight for your God" part in creating Osama Bin Laden, al Queda and the Taliban,?

This is how the CIA mafia runs a Whitehouse, get over it.

[JohnnyCougar]

6. Umm...we're only in day two of the Feingold censure measure.

So just hold your horses.

[heirs_of_liberty]

18. Lies and high crimes are now ok because of Osama bin Bush?

[helderheid]

20. .

[Hippo_Tron]

3. Not only that, he ran a shitty insider campaign

Bob Shrum's record of 0 and 7 should wave a red flag not to hire him as your political director.

[wisteria]

7. Disagree, Kerry ran a decent campaign . Too bad you want to

only remember the loss. Nothing like second guessing. Of course, you guy would have done better. he just needed to beat Kerry in the primaries first.

[Hippo_Tron]

21. Kerry hired Bob Shrum as his political director

Bob Shrum has lost 8 presidential elections (counting Kerry's) and won zero. Kerry even realized that Shrum was doing a bad job and took him out of that job in September. Too little too late, unfortunately.

Kerry replaced Shrum with Lockhardt and started consulting with Carville and Begala in September. These guys are the best strategists (that we know of) in the democratic party. A few weeks after his management shift, his poll numbers started to go back up. Kerry should have hired them from the beginning, period.

And if you would read my post, I am not saying that any candidate could have done better. Kerry was a very good candidate but his handlers managed his message terribly. If he had hired Carville, Lockhardt, and Sasso from the beginning he would be president right now. I can't say the same for everybody else that was in the primary, though.

Watch The War Room and watch how Carville and Stephanopolous go on the offensive and also how respond to Bush's attacks against Clinton. Compare that to the way that the Swift Boat thing was botched by Cahill and Shrum and you will see why Kerry had the wrong guys running his operation.

[incapsulated]

4. That was good.

I agree with his description of the problem, but I don't know how to fix it, other than to kill the strategists. Which I'm all for, but that isn't legal, I don't think, heh.

Dems standing together would be a start.

[msgadget]

9. "...when they’re not applying their cold hands to Democratic campaigns,

the strategists can put a chill on any Democrat’s principled behavior by whispering in the ears of journalists that a seemingly noble act is reckless, calculated or somehow both."

The hatchet job on Hackett, Pelosi's problems with Dean's strategy, the leaders' reluctance to advance a defining agenda, Feingold's 'grandstanding'... Every single disparate thought democrats have finds its way into the msm via anonymous strategists and former Clinton aides. You have to wonder why that is, why the insiders consider any hint of independence subversive even though the very reporters they leak to are describing a hesitant, fractured, powerless party, their party. They are becoming as big an enemy to the party as any republican, often beating them to the punch when things get a little heated. Our voices are not drowned out, they are ignored, allegedly on the advice of these unelected people.

Do you think Kerry will heed the author's advice with the three-pronged approach he suggested? He is standing behind Feingold.

Great article, thank you, helderheid.

Edit for spelling

[politicasista]

11. I think he will

He usually learns from his mistakes. I hope he will get some more forceful, stronger advisers (Hopefully DC outsiders). He needs to be himself. He is better that way.

My two cents.

[LittleClarkie]

19. I found it interesting that Big Eddie mentioned that the Kerry camp

felt like they'd been infiltrated, not only in the way of bugging and such, but also as Ed Schultz said "with boot on the ground".

It's not easy to conduct a proper campaign when it turns out you couldn't trust the staffers on your side. I rememeber talking to a reporter who said that she'd heared from the grapevine that Kerry had not caved in Ohio so much as he was set up by people who were supposed to be on his side and weren't.

[ProSense]

12. Funny his BCCI report came out in 1992; The Kerry-Wellstone

Clean Money, Clean Elections Act was written in 1997. Senator Kerry introduced the following bill that he wrote along with Senator Wellstone:

S.918
Title: A bill to reform the financing of Federal Elections.
Sponsor: Sen Kerry, John F. (introduced 6/17/1997) Cosponsors (4)
Latest Major Action: 6/17/1997 Referred to Senate committee. Status: Read twice and referred to the Committee on Rules and Administration.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=132&topic_id=2445744&mesg_id=2445744

[IsItJustMe]

14. I have always believed that many politicians go to DC full of ideology and

fight. Then after a while, once they get in there, they forget what they were fighting for and why they went there to begin with.

[karynnj]

15. Using Iran -contra would have been a disaster

How likely do you think it would have been to win voters if Kerry spoke about his contra-drug investigation only months after the death of Saint Ronald. I think I'm a reasonably well read person, yet I really had no memory of these charges having been proved. Now, I know that that story was buried in the middle of the paper some time in the early 90s. I did remember "rumors" of such things. Many books on Iran/Contra ignore it as the Walsh hearings did. It's a terrible thing to accept - that your government turned a blind eye to cocaine coming into the country. Crack destroyed many people in this country.

Would the press that was extremely unfair to Kerry anyway have reported that this work was labelled accurate by the CIA when they wanted to avert a second investigation? If I, a pretty partisan person, had difficulty believing that even Reagan/Bush would do this - how likely would those people in the middle, who very likely voted for Reagan, believe it? What percent, having to choose between their sanitized version of America and Kerry's proven charges, would simply think the Democrats had nominated a "randy conspiracy buff”?

As to Kerry trimming his sails after Iran/Contra - BCCI and the POW/MIA work seems to contradict this. Also, unless he has quotes I doubt Kerry saw these actions as the way to the White House. Although from an earlier time (1971), Kerry, in answer to Safer on wanting to be President - said something like there were important things that had to be done and he didn't know if he could do them and make enough people happy with him to be President. So, it's clear Kerry in 1971 didn't think you became President by doing controversial things, but he felt they had to be done.

Parry's last paragraph was strange - seeing that he earlier was saying that Kerry blew it by palying it safe - the conditions he cites for Feingold to succeed - clearly don't exist. (Not for Feingold and not for Kerry.)

[EFerrari]

16. There were no Nicaraguan Conta rebels. There were only

paid contractors that worked for Saint Ronnie.

[heirs_of_liberty]

17. Liberty's the fire of enlightenment, so where's our fire in the belly?

Sadly more and more Americans are being lulled into a false sense of secure complacency with the bald-faced criminality, fraud, theft, graft, deception, secrecy and corruption in Washington it becomes harder and harder to raise any corner of the curtain of lies or even dare discuss the truth.

The reason the noble conservative-privatist Tory BushCorp can get away with it is simple. Their conservative socialist power base are corrupted and corruptible religious socialist conservative ideologs who's loyalties and mentalities are ones of despotic fealty to blind faith, not the material facts of reality. Faith is the key to their dominions over their petty fiefdoms, thus any opponents allusion to any matter of moral conflict involving faith is immediately dismissed as heresy to the unwashed hordes of their faithful acolytes.

Re-designing reality for them is as simple as playing semantic big-word games. The first was allowing the Marxist religion to claim the word 'socialism' to describe it's communal-socialist brand of dogmatic atheistic religious beliefs, and to thus confuse Liberal Socialism with Communism, thus making 'liberal' and 'liberty' dirty words. Indeed while it would be difficult to politically establish Episcopal Socialism, or Jewish Socialism or Roman Catholic Socialism into fascist dogmatic neo-Nazi tyrannies over Americans contrary to our constitution, it is childishly simple to extol the graces of non-sectarian "Christian" Socialism because who can fault 'loving' generic Christianity?

But the reality is they have gathered not moderates or liberals, but a coalition of extreme conservative fundamentalist hate-cultist proselytizers, who can easily raise a populist mob of falsely outraged support with hate speech, distortions, lies and innuendo, whenever conservatism needs a re-injection of fire in the belly to get the vote out. Indeed this neo-Nazi 'Christian Fascist Coalition' is every bit as evil as the Muslim fascists and Jewish fascists with whom we are gleefully and wholeheartedly participating in this new World War III.

Indeed, the keys to power for illiberal totalitarian Conservative Fascists have always been the alignment of a conservative privatist (noble wealthy elitist) core of elite monied corruption and greed with the electoral, populist power of dogmatic religious socialist doctrinal tyranny (the 'workers religion' of Marxism being no exception).

"Today Christians rule Germany! I pledge that I never will tie myself to parties who want to destroy Christianity .. We want to fill our culture again with the Christian spirit ... We want to burn out all the recent immoral developments in literature, in the theater, and in the press - in short, we want to burn out the poison of immorality which has entered into our whole life and culture as a result of liberal excess..." - *The Speeches of Adolph Hitler, 1922-1939,

What we learn from the above is all about reading between the lines. The Wiemar Republic was not a Republic of Liberty, Germany even already had an electorally established Roman Catholic Party. The Nazi's genius was to see that they could appeal to a broader conservative socialist coalition called 'Christianity' thus mopping up on all outspoken radical right wing conservative socialist extremists of every Christianist stripe. While their truly most hated and reviled victims were to be elite wealthy Jewish German bankers, industrialists and merchants and often Jewish-lead labor unions they cleverly made their case against the mechanism of Liberty which had enabled Jewish emancipation into German culture. Thus their argument against non-Christians was made by omission in an otherwise rather moderate and reasonable sounding appeal.

The National Republican party (I prefer to say so-called 'republican') has played exactly the same Tory Neo-Conservative Socialist, fascist game. Unfortunately more and more it seems to be in collusion with Muslim Fascists and deeply behind a sinister arch-Christian MI6 Anglican Crusader's 'Revelationist' mafia plot to once again destroy not only Israel and it's Jews but the entire world in a fiery Global Armageddon to prove their neo-Jesus thingy is the True 'God' (hopefully not some deeply incensed Rabbi who'll surely smite them back hard LOL).

Could a God that is the universal Love of the 5th dimension of Gravitation itself have words of hatred and mindless destruction sufficient to destroy all life on earth placed in it's mouth by human religious socialist proselytizers so empowered in their hateful tombs of manufactured dogma that mindless slaves would willingly stage Doomsday to serve these masters? Of course they can and are!

In the name of so-called 'free trade' these Conservative Privatists have all but abolished the Liberal well-regulated' Free Market System of our forefathers and surreptitiously replaced it with global Noble Mercantile transnational tax evading monopolist Cabalism, the very Whig Cabals our Revolutionary War was waged to end! But now these noble elite corporate cabals are beyond any law, any regulation and any nation! These greedy exploiters now hide in the Cayman Islands and there plot against all the peoples of the earth in defiance of all regulation and taxation.

America has exported all of its 'means of production' industrial wealth to a communal socialist fascist tyranny in Red China, which exploits human slavery once again.

The problem with the Afghan War was that it was won too easily! Tory BushCorp had to have an expensive boiling quagmire of an endless war in Iraq, because the only production that could 'grow' America's remaining unexportable military industrial economy was military industrial waste! The phony growth we see in America today is all based upon the squandering of trillions of borrowed dollars on military related war production! Bring those troops home and we now face a catastrophic recession perhaps worse than any other in history.

We can beat the National Republican Nazi's of Tory BushCorp with truth and the rekindling of America's faith in Liberty and Liberalism - two words our opponents dare not even mention to their ever dwindling mob of 'faithful'...

We must always never forget to remind our listeners of the easy way the CIA Mafia crime cabal can easily be used to once again engineer a Daniel Chapter 8 show like the burning of the Reichstag on September 11th in a vain attempt to rekindle the hatred that they thrive upon but we know who is behind it all and why they do not even want to continue seek a fair and honorable, liberal UN Resolution 181 peace!