Alright! Kerry branded "Liberal"

Since that suck-ass Chi-Town Trib has such an onerous registration process...

No, I won't post ALL of the article :)

'Liberal' tag resurrected to pin on John Kerry

By Jill Zuckman
Tribune national correspondent

February 24, 2004

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Outside the Plumbers and Pipe Fitters union hall, a scraggly band of young Republicans stood in the cold, waving their "Hanoi John" and "Bush-Cheney" signs at Sen. John Kerry's motorcade.

As Kerry closes in on the Democratic nomination for president, the Bush campaign has begun to try to portray him as a Massachusetts liberal, a hypocrite who switches positions for political expedience and a disloyal war protester from the hippie era.

"John Kerry is out of sync with most Americans, whether it's raising taxes or providing for a strong national defense," said Terry Holt, a senior official with the Bush campaign. "He's voted against every significant weapons system at work in Iraq and in the war on global terror. . . . Yes, he's liberal, but maybe more disturbing is that he's a phony."

It is an approach that worked famously before in the 1988 campaign of Bush's father against former Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis. Kerry has vowed that the strategy will not work again.

In a culture often given to ready caricature, however, resisting that label might be more difficult than Kerry thinks, especially because the Bush campaign will have more than $150 million in its coffer before the national political conventions this summer.

Kerry says he refuses to be branded, and he insists that his record is too complex to be susceptible to simplistic tags like `Massachusetts liberal.'

"I laugh at that," Kerry said in Oklahoma City recently. "The American people deserve something more than labels. What they want is leadership, and they're going to look me in the eye, all Americans are, and they'll make a judgment about my character and they will look at my record."

Combing Kerry's record

Indeed, officials within the Bush campaign and the Republican National Committee are looking closely at Kerry's record, even though he has not yet clinched the Democratic presidential nomination. They plan to back up their assertions using the lawmaker's votes--a total of 6,320--over the past 19 years in the Senate. They say his actions in the Senate will show him to be cozy with lobbyists and special interest groups, soft on defense and inconsistent when it comes to intelligence funding, gay marriage and the Iraq war.

"John Kerry has one of the longest legislative records in the United States Senate and it's significantly to the left of where the American public is," said Tom Rath, the Republican national committeeman from New Hampshire. "It's really not playing dirty when you simply remind people of somebody's voting record."

On Monday, Kerry said in New York that he does consider attacks on his voting record an assault on his patriotism. The senator noted he voted for the largest defense spending increase in history, and Republicans want to portray him as weak and "that's the game they play."

Stephanie Cutter, a spokeswoman for Kerry, said that legislative record includes his votes for welfare reform, defense spending and deficit control. His vocal support for the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings plan to balance the budget with automatic spending cuts if certain spending targets were not reached was a controversial one for a New England Democrat who was new to the Senate in 1985.

"He is not definable in the way Republicans want to define him," Cutter said.

Kerry's campaign is creating a rapid response team to contend with GOP attacks, and officials say the Republican broadsides are only half the story.

"We're ready to tell the truth about George Bush's failed policy," said Cutter. "He says he's strong on defense, but America is not stronger today than it was 3 1/2 years ago. He's not strong on the economy. Each step of the way, he says he's going to create 2 million jobs, and he's not been able to produce it."

Already, the Bush campaign has begun targeting Kerry as he stumps for votes. The day before Democratic front-runner traveled to the Ohio cities of Dayton and Columbus last week, Rep. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), a key player in the Bush-Cheney orbit, held a conference call with reporters to defend the president's economic policies.

Kerry campaign officials quickly fought back by producing two Ohio mayors to talk of devastating job losses and plant closings in their cities during Bush's tenure.

Bush campaign officials say everything is fair game, including Kerry's years as a young anti-war protester.

"We honor John Kerry's service in Vietnam," Holt said. "But it's his record since Vietnam that we would question. Obviously, as a protester, he said some fairly controversial things."

Providing ammunition

One of those things was a 1970 Harvard Crimson interview in which Kerry said U.S. troops should only be deployed at the direction of the United Nations.

"I think the issue is he has advocated a weaker national defense over a long public career," said Ralph Reed, chairman of the Bush-Cheney campaign for the Southeast region.

More at link

I really don't think the Bushistas want to revisit the '70s. I'm sure that there are some people that have fond memories of a younger Bush engaged in some good ol' fun.

I'd like to be called a 'liberal.' It's liberals that founded this country. Damned consrvatives were the Tories. Plus, As previously not my colleagues think of me as a neo-Bakunin. So a move to the right would be required to earn me the label liberal. :)

You can really smell the fear in the air from the Bush camp. What an aroma ;)