Reply #1: I've seen it, but in a fair number of cases, I've seen them say that Kerry was "unfairly"

[karynnj]

labeled a flip flopper. Obviously this happens less than half the time, but it is good that it happens at all - as he got no defense in 2005/2006 on this.

On ones that don't - including one in my local paper that got in as a LTTE, I have taken the time to post that what the Republicans used was not a series of issues where he changed 180 degrees, but an unfortunate shorthand where he summarized for a second questioner/heckler an answer he had just given in detail. The question was why did you vote against funding the troops. Kerry had explained that he voted to fund it - but with it being paid for by rolling back the tax cuts on the top 1% - a version Bush said he would veto. He then cast a protest vote on the Republican version that passed because it added it to the debt. Then adding a line referring to the current Republican obsession with the deficit. (Knowing the question asked, Kerry's shorthand does not immediately seem bad - and speaking 16 hours a day, he couldn't really parse every sentence for reasons it could hurt him without having seemed incapable of answering a question off the cuff. That this really hurt was partly because the media played dumb acting like this was incomprehensible rather than pretty obvious. (Even without that the wording would have led to Republican ads.)

The sad thing is that for someone in public life for 3 (or 4) decades, his positions are remarkably consistent. Always an environmentalist, always anti- corruption (which is why the current RW attacks on him holding up the money for the corrupt anti-Castro groups is completely consistent - though the Miami Herald doesn't see it that way), and his foreign policy ideas are not far from his views in 1966. Obvious there is some change, but if there were no change in that length of time, you would worry about being too rigid.