October 28, 2004
DEEP QAQA:
KERRY CAMP'S FINAL FUMBLE (DICK MORRIS, October 28, 2004, NY Post)
ONCE again, John Kerry shows his instinct to go for the capillaries, rather than the jugular.Kerry has embraced the dubious New York Times/CBS accusations about U.S. bungling permitting the theft of explosives from an ammunition dump in Iraq. The senator has chosen to predicate the entire final week of his campaign on the unsolvable mystery of what happened to the bomb-making material in the chaos surrounding the invasion of Iraq.
By stepping up to bat and running an ad in which he speaks directly into the camera in an effort to win votes over the issue, Kerry has made the dubious journalistic accusations his own and bet his credibility and his candidacy on the outcome.
How will we ever know when the explosives were removed from Al-Qaqaa and by whom? How can we tell if they were taken away by Saddam's minions before or after he fell from power, before or after the United States troops had passed by the dump? We can't, any more than we can tell who did what in the jungles of Vietnam 30 years ago.
Because we can't know the final truth of Al-Qaqaa, it was a ridiculous decision by the Kerry campaign to jump with all four feet onto the issue. When Kerry should be scoring aggressive points, he will find himself debating the fine questions of who did what in Iraq in the frenzied days of late March and early April of 2003.
The problem is not just that the story is bogus but that it is incoherent. Until a week ago the Left had largely won the argument about whether Saddam retained a significant WMD threat on the day of the invasion. The overwhelming majority of ordinary Americans still think he was a threat, but at least the seeds of doubt had been planted. Now though, in an effort to stir up hysteria, the Kerry campaign has to so overreach on this al-Qaqa story that they are implicitly claiming that Saddam did indeed have WMD when we invaded. Given that the Senator has reversed himself over the course of the campaign and says that he would not have replaced Saddam, based on the assertion that he was no threat, to now claim that he was a threat undermines his own case against the war. Al-Qaqa is a political loser and running on it for the final week would be disastrous. He won't. Posted by Orrin Judd at October 28, 2004 06:57 PM
What do you mean "he won't?" He already is. It's Thursday already.
Posted by: Twn at October 28, 2004 07:04 PMHe won't run the ad this weekend. Thursday of 2000 Bush had a five point victory in the bag.
Posted by: oj at October 28, 2004 07:16 PMKerry Spot's saying that his various spokespeople are all trying to avoid the subject already. This is Bush's topic now, and he'll ride it to the end.
Unless, of course, Fox News gets its act together this weekend and starts speculating loudly that Bin Laden is dead, in which case Bush will ride cryptic statements about the state of Bin Laden's existence.
Posted by: Timothy at October 28, 2004 07:26 PMOJ, I am confused about your 5 pt comment. Are you saying Kerry has a victory in the bag and as long as he doesn't blow it by riding this story?
Posted by: JAB at October 28, 2004 07:41 PMNo. I'm saying it's early yet. The race is likely to swing five points from here. Bush by 8 or Kerry by a point or two both seem possible. As the tracking numbers continue to sink Mr. Kerry will drop the qaqa.
Posted by: oj at October 28, 2004 07:52 PMDid anyone think to look in the Baghdad Museum basement?
Posted by: Raoul Ortega at October 28, 2004 08:12 PMThree things that make a 5 point swing toward Kerry unlikely:
1) Bush is the incumbent this time.
2) There's a war on.
3) One of the media/Kerry-campaign's October surprises just blew up in their faces.
What's the basis for a late swing?
I tend to think in my gut a late swing goes to the incumbent. But apparently the data is split.
Posted by: JAB at October 28, 2004 08:36 PMUnless the MSM has another "October Surprise" up its sleeve, and even at this late date I wouldn't put _anything_ past them, I don't see a swing back toward Kerry. Bush is blitzing the swing states over the weekend, including a full day of campaigning on Sunday which he didn't do in '00, and people are even campaigning for him to hit Hawaii though I don't see how it's logistically possible in the short time remaining.
Posted by: Joe at October 28, 2004 08:46 PMI appreciate that most Americans can't (or don't want to) translate U.N. acronyms, but is it possible that some voters might link this story to the 'IAEA'; that is, the U.N. organization tasked with investigating 'nucular' weapons. If the stuff at al-Qaqa wasn't nuclear related, why was el-Baradei (however you spell or pronounce his name) investigating it? And why is el-Baradei, Mr. Nuclear, upset about efforts to secure the facility in question?
Posted by: Fred Jacobsen (San Fran) at October 28, 2004 09:08 PMSo would that be more or less disastrous than not resigning his Senate seat, picking John Edwards as his running mate, spending his entire acceptance speech talking about Vietnam, pitifully botching so many attempts to sound like a regular-Joe sportsfan, etc, etc?
Posted by: brian at October 28, 2004 10:27 PMMy gut sense is that this election will be like '94, or Florida in 2002. In both cases the media and pollsters were caught offguard by a surging GOP vote. It's still a nail-biter, but there are plenty of signs that much of Kerry's support is shaky (supposedly solid blue states in play, more black and Jewish voters choosing Bush, etc.). And Kerry has run an often comically inept campaign, as noted above.
Posted by: PapayaSF at October 28, 2004 10:37 PMUpdate on Hawaii: Dick Cheney is going out there on Sunday. Team Kerry is sending Al Gore.
Posted by: Joe at October 29, 2004 02:23 AMKerry seems addicted to what some pundits call 'Inside Baseball.' His concern about nonsense that matters only to people inside the Beltway or at cocktail parties in the Hub or the Upper West Side shows just how completely out of touch he is from ordinary Americans. Human beings, as distinguished from the chattering classes, understand that war is a messy business that a small percentage of an enormous cache of explosives is not a big deal. This is even more irrelevant than Abu Gharib.
Posted by: Bart at October 29, 2004 06:25 AM>Al-Qaqa is a political loser and running on it
>for the final week would be disastrous. He won't.
Al-Caca lasted for only 2-3 days. He's now switched to FBI investigations of Halliburton and Cheney and Big Oil.
Posted by: Ken at October 29, 2004 12:32 PM