Did Senator John Kerry out fox the Republicans with his comments encouraging young people to stay in school or end up in Iraq? Well if his intention was to fire up both Republican and Democratic voters, he was successful with that comment. For months now all polls show that Americans are upset with the results so far in the Iraqi War and most people want to see the government move in a different direction because they don’t believe the current plan is working. The airwaves have been filled today with Republican operatives rushing to denounce John Kerry’s statements and demanding an apology. Kerry’s comments will help Republicans fire up their base of voters, but his comments might fire up Democratic and Independent voters even more.
Republican strategist have been working for weeks to get the War in Iraq off the front pages of newspapers because that issue is seen as a loser for them on November 7th. However, by party leaders attacking John Kerry with both barrels about his Iraq comments, the GOP has put the issue they have been trying to run away from for weeks back on the front burner. Will the American people be able to separate John Kerry’s comments from other Democrats running in the election? That is the big question to me and if they can then John Kerry might just have out foxed the best political analysis in the business, Karl Rove.
The art of politics is to entrap your opponent into doing something they believe to be good for their campaign, but in reality it has the opposite effect. John Kerry is banking on an intelligent electorate who will be able to separate his comments from their dislike of the Iraqi War. That is the biggest problem with this gamble on Kerry’s part because while there are millions of Americans who are paying attention to what is being said each day in this election season, millions of other potential voters hardly ever pay much attention to the news. I had notice the past few weeks that President Bush had been successful in changing the subject away from Iraq and onto other issues where people were more closely aliened to his positions.
Now, however, the news about John Kerry’s statement will dominate the news for the next week and the actual text of that debate will be the War in Iraq which could remind people why they oppose the Bush administration and many Republican’s who have rubber stamped the administrations policies from day one. My feeling is that this statement by Kerry will hurt some Democrats and could cause some of them to lose next week. However, the calculation by Kerry and most certainly other Democratic strategist is that without Iraq on the front burner each day of this week, their changes of victory could be diminished, anyway. This is hardball politics at its best right now and if you would have asked me at the beginning of October what this years "October Surprise" would be, I would have never thought it would have been caused by Senator John Kerry.
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Tuesday, October 31, 2006
Wide Open Race - John Kerry Comments
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