A Chequer-Board of Nights and Days

Reaction time: I guess above all else, I'm kind of amused. As is well known, Senator Kerry claims that the joke was "botched" and that the actual target of the joke was President Bush. Speaking quite practically, I have to say--and others who are not of my political inclinations are saying it too--that this would represent quite a significant degree of "botching."

Did I say "quite a significant degree"?

I'm still pretty torn on this controversy. Had Kerry simply come out yesterday and said, Whoops, my bad -- I left out a couple of key words from the punchline and left the wrong impression -- my apologies!, I think the entire story would have died immediately. However, in his typically tone-deaf manner, he decided to brand the entire incident a Republican smear, despite the fact that he had been quoted accurately.

Now he's left with the argument that he misquoted himself while trying to show off his supposed intellectual superiority over George Bush, and that it's all Bush's fault despite being Kerry's intellectual inferior. Really, no one could have scripted a more hilarious scenario, and the longer Kerry continues this line of defense/offense, the more ridiculous a figure he becomes. It demonstrates clearly that the "I was for the $87 billion before I was against it" gaffe was no fluke.

No, it wasn't. And of course, the scary thing is that a number of Kerry's friends aren't willing to let this go without slamming him:

[Kerry's] initial impulse, predictably enough, was to fight back against the criticism. He didn't want to fall again into what turned out to be the biggest trap of 2004, when he failed to understand that a relatively small ad buy from a group that no one had ever heard of could be more damaging than he imagined. He was determined not to be "swift-boated" again. So he declared: "If anyone owes our troops in the fields an apology, it is the President and his failed team and a Republican majority in the Congress that has been willing to stamp -- rubber-stamp policies that have done injury to our troops and to their families." But even Rand Beers, his national security adviser in the 2004 campaign, said: "It's unfortunate that Senator Kerry misspoke. No one who has ever been in combat would intentionally impugn our brave troops."

Well, one would hope not. Alas, there is a fairly long history of veterans being angry about comments Senator Kerry has made about them. And while I certainly don't think that this issue is nearly as earth-shattering as, say, the reconstruction of Iraq or reducing the size of a government that has grown too big, the fact of the matter remains that cosmetics are part and parcel of politics and that one has to be careful to show one's best political side to the public. Republicans have suffered in the past from the issuance of stray gaffes. I guess now, it's the Democrats' turn to writhe in more than a little bit of agony.