The untenable position

Steven Taylor writes: “These kinds of pronouncement from the Senator continue to confirm my view that he really does not have a firm position on Iraq, that both his votes (for the resolution and against the $87 billion) were both political calculations, and that he is trying to say whatever he thinks the swing voters want to hear.”

This is exactly correct: Kerry cannot extricate himself from those votes and each passing day brings a more outlandish explanation for them. The “yes-no” vote was a breathtakingly cynical and ultimately indefensible gambit. Consider the following vote combinations on both the Iraq war resolution and the $87 billion supplemental funding:

Yes/Yes – A hawkish, but defensible, vote combination to support both the President and the troops.
No/No – A dovish, yet principled, vote against all aspects of the war.
No/Yes – You were against the war, but with troops in the field, it’s necessary to support them.
Yes/No – In the most charitable definition I can conjure: you voted to give the President authority to go to war. He did (although not the way you would have!) and then you withheld funding for the troops…why?

The New Yorker reveals:

Bush has lately claimed the Iraq war to be a Kosovo-like “humanitarian intervention,” but that notion has never had more than a minuscule following among Democrats; and although Dean’s candidacy imploded in Iowa, and voters united around Kerry as the best bet to beat Bush, a deep vein of disapproval for his Iraq votes still runs through the Democratic base.

That unease is compounded by the obvious political calculation of Kerry’s vote last fall to withhold eighty-seven billion dollars of auxiliary support for the military in Afghanistan and Iraq. As one of his advisers put it to me, “Off the record, he did it because of Howard Dean. On the record, he has an elaborate explanation.” Kerry originally supported an amendment sponsored by Senator Joseph Biden that would have funded the war by temporarily reducing Bush’s tax cuts to the wealthiest one per cent of Americans. But Biden’s bill had no chance of passing in a Republican-dominated Senate, and Kerry’s absurdly abbreviated account of the matter—“I did vote for the eighty-seven billion before I voted against it”—has left him open to relentless Republican ridicule. Biden himself ultimately voted for the money, and he confirmed that Kerry’s decision not to was “tactical,” an attempt “to prove to Dean’s guys I’m not a warmonger.”

This past week, President Bush managed to pin Kerry down on one issue and it proved disastrous for the Senator, leading to grumbling among Democratic staffers that Kerry had been duped by Bush (again!). Over the next couple of months, Senator Splunge will have to reconcile his positions for a dozen other issues on which he’s vacillated, equivocated and flip-flopped. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but to echo Matt Margolis: bring on the debates!