Kerry Spot    [ jim geraghty reporting ]
[ kerry spot home | archives | email ]

So some Kerry supporters are giddy about a FactCheck.org analysis, of the latest Bush campaign ad. FactCheck.org concludes, "aside from the $87 billion matter, this Bush ad is a textbook example of how to mislead voters through selective editing."

Indeed, the Bush campaign does use one-sentence snippets from Kerry, and the Democratic candidate doesn't speak in sound bites. He speaks in paragraphs. With addenda. And parenthetical caveats. And footnotes. And endnotes. And maybe an appendix.

You get the idea.

So FactCheck.org is on safe ground when they contend that Kerry's full-length statements are more nuanced and complicated than the excerpts would suggest, and that they contain more shades of gray than an original print of The Maltese Falcon. However, they can't make the case — or a compelling case, at least — that Kerry's stand on Iraq has been coherent.

The Bush campaign missed Kerry's most striking recent statement, that those who had fallen in Iraq died "in the war on terror." Of course, a central point of the Kerry campaign has been that Iraq is a distraction from the war on terror. Kerry's "war on terror" statement came one day after he called Iraq "the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time."

He has pledged "significant, enormous reduction in the level of troops."

Kerry said at the Grand Canyon that if he knew then what he knew now, that "Yes, I would have voted for the authority. I believe it was the right authority for a president to have." But on The Late Show with David Letterman last week, Letterman asked Kerry: "If you had been elected president in 2000...would we be in Iraq now?" Kerry's surprisingly unequivocal answer: "No."

Huh? If Kerry were president, we wouldn't have invaded Iraq. But he voted for it, and even if he knew we wouldn't find WMDs (yet), he still would have voted to invade. (And it's time for Kerry to drop the hair-splitting that the voted for the option of invading, not for the invasion itself. There is no "yes, but" button in the U.S. Senate. Up or down, buddy. One or the other. Binary. Essentially, Kerry is arguing that he voted for the invasion of Iraq, but only the parts that have gone well.)

FactCheck.org credits Kerry for consistently saying he would have tried more diplomacy before invading. But the evidence suggests that diplomatic efforts to build a broader coalition were akin to banging one's head against a brick wall. France and Germany, the Iraq-war opponents most often cited by Kerry supporters as vital allies no longer at our side, never would have joined the posse to hunt down Hussein. They're now saying that even under a Kerry presidency they wouldn't send troops to Iraq.

Can one argue that the Bush ad unfairly edited the trees? Sure. But a good look at the forest makes clear the charge of Kerry's flip-flopping is fair and accurate.