Deconstructing Kerry

Nov. 2, 2006 — -- By now, you no doubt know about the Kerry kerfuffle.

On Monday, in front of a group of college students in Pasadena, Calif., former 2003 presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., joked about education and Iraq.

"You know education," he said. "If you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well, and if you don't you get stuck in Iraq."

Kerry said later that he meant to be impugn the intelligence of the president who got the nation stuck in Iraq, not the soldiers who are there.

That didn't matter, though, to the Republicans who seemed anxious to voice a defense of the troops against what they called an attack from Kerry rather than talk about how the war in Iraq was progressing.

President Bush joined the fray, saying in Georgia Tuesday night that "the senator from Massachusetts owes [the troops] an apology."

Members of the Bush administration were dispatched Wednesday to continue to fan the flames of the controversy.

Campaigning in Montana Wednesday night, Vice President Dick Cheney told a cheering crowd that "Senator Kerry said he was just making a joke, and he botched it up. I guess we didn't get the nuance."

Alluding to Kerry's infamous line that he had voted in favor of $87 billion for U.S. troops before he voted against it, Cheney said that Kerry "was for the joke before he was against it."

As Kerry combatively refused to apologize, giving a combative news conference in Seattle and impugning "despicable Republicans" for attacking him.

He personally attacked White House spokesman Tony Snow as a "stuffed suit … mouthpiece" and talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh as "doughy," making the story bigger and bigger.

Outsider in His Own Party

Kerry was all but ostracized by his own party.

Baron Hill, a Democratic congressional candidate in Indiana, returned a Kerry campaign contribution.

Kerry canceled campaign events with three Democratic candidates on Wednesday. Leaders of his own party threw him under the proverbial bus.

"I disagree with Sen. Kerry's remarks, but he is not on the ballot," said Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

"What Sen. Kerry said was inappropriate," said Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y.

On Wednesday afternoon, Kerry finally issued a paper statement apologizing.

All over America, Democrats were scratching their heads, wondering, "What is going on with John Kerry?"

The Road to Ruin

How did this man -- for whom more than 59 million Americans voted to be leader of the free world in 2004 -- find himself in this sad spot?

ABC News wanted to explore this question, though Kerry and several senior advisers would not talk to discuss it.

Kerry's office suggested we speak to Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., but Biden's office told us he was busy traveling. So we asked other experts.

"John Kerry is not a very good politician," said Joe Lockhart, a senior adviser to Kerry during his presidential campaign. "Politicians who succeed and do well have great internal instincts and have a great ear for what works and what doesn't. John Kerry has neither. He's not a funny guy. He's not a natural guy. He is not someone who can pick up on the nuances of a daily political battle."

Lockhart says that Kerry, "like a lot of highly educated people," has trouble coming to terms with the fact that "something as important as electing a president or electing a Congress can turn on something so trivial, like a word left out of a joke."

"They take themselves and the process so seriously they have trouble dealing with the rest of the system, dealing with it in such a trivial, half-assed way," Lockhart said. "That's the reality of the situation. Does it make him somehow less of a person? No, I think it makes him more of a person. Does it make him a good politician? No, it doesn't make him a good politician."

That said, Lockhart added, "John Kerry is a good man, and that's why he has gotten as far as he has in politics. So when he says he was telling a joke, everyone should believe him."

But even if we take Kerry at his word -- that he was calling Bush an idiot and not the troops -- why is that appropriate?

New Republic writer Michael Crowley, who has covered Kerry for years, said that "I think Kerry is convinced he's smarter than Bush."

Despite revelations that Kerry's grades at Yale were actually slightly lower than Bush's, Kerry sees himself as intellectually inquisitive and far brighter than the president.

But Crowley said that letting such feelings known was not smart politics.

"It plays exactly into the caricature of a sort of haughty, entitled elitist that I think turns off huge swaths of the public," he said.

"I don't think it's the most effective attack on the president, because I don't think it's true and I don't know that people really believe that," Lockhart said.

"Trying to poke fun at a political opponent on an issue so serious as the war in Iraq is very risky and very rarely works," Lockhart said. "And a better political sense would say, even if someone handed you that joke written for you, 'You said I'm not going to tell this one. it just doesn't sound right. It's not going to come off the right way. It could to be misconstrued.'"

Beyond what Kerry calls a "botched joke" is Kerry's refusal to apologize for words that sounded on their face to be insulting to troops. His combativeness made this even more of a story.

Chris Lehane, who worked briefly as a press secretary on Kerry's presidential campaign, said Kerry didn't follow the proper political game plan.

"You have to take one for the team in this situation," Lehane said. "You have to quickly issue the apology -- even if you didn't intend to say what people are accusing you of saying -- to bring this matter to an end."

Looking Back Two Years

But Kerry did the opposite.

As opposed to the general rule of political gaffes -- to minimize the coverage, apologize comprehensively and immediately -- Kerry's public response was angry, obstinate and aggressive, even after it was clear that by doing that he was refocusing attention on himself instead of on the unpopular war in Iraq that had looked to help propel Democrats to electoral successes next week.

Where did that angry response come from?

Rewind to Election Day 2004.

Incomplete exit polls meant that for several hours, Kerry thought he had been elected president.

Top aide Bob Shrum even called him "Mr. President." And then the real election results came in.

"It was all snatched away from him. And I think it's a terrible burden to live with," Crowley said.

What to do with that pain? Whom to blame?

When Democrats rehash why Kerry wasn't elected president, many point to the late summer 2004 attacks by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a group of Vietnam veterans who impugned Kerry's war record.

They point to the fact that Kerry waited weeks to fight back and counter accusations, and even then he didn't do so effectively.

A Tortured Soul?

"The Swift Boat attacks reshaped John Kerry's view of politics," Lockhart said. "I think he thought that politics was a cerebral business, where if you made an honest, just case, people would believe you, and he found out that politics is an emotion-based business where facts and fiction often get mixed up and good fiction often trumps good facts."

Since then, Kerry has been determined not to let that ever happen again, not to be "Swift Boat"-ed.

"He has since that campaign kind of been like a guy in the weight room, training and building up his muscles, spoiling for the next fight," Crowley said. "It explains why when there's a faint whiff of something similar in the air, he wants to go out and get it right. But the problem is I think now he's overreacting. He's overcompensating."

Politics can be cruel. It's a profession of power and adulation and unbelievable highs, and one of impotence, rejection and lows that most people cannot begin to fathom.

It can wreak havoc on a man's soul.