Ted Kennedy's Iraq-is-George-W.-Bush's-Vietnam speech dominated the news for three days. It's a telling indication of how valuable the senior senator from Massachusetts is going to be for his junior's campaign for president.
The ability to grab headlines for days at a time may be more valuable than a $10 million “527” contribution at this stage of the game. And from Kennedy's point of view, the speech worked so well (despite the harsh countercriticism) that he plans on making another one in a month.
“It's only a glimmer in his eye right now,” says one top aide. “But the strategy is to keep questioning the credibility of this administration.”
The Kennedy people swear they're not coordinating with the Kerry camp, but it's so hard to tell the staffs apart that it hardly matters. In this year of his discontent with Bush, Kennedy is going to be a lead horse for the Kerry bandwagon.
The zeal with which Kennedy has come to Kerry's aid has caused chuckles among those who've observed the less-than-warm relationship between the two over the years. But it's better not to mention that.
“You guys have mischaracterized that relationship for years. It's like any senior-junior in the Senate,” says one staffer, frustration dripping from every word. As he explains, they basically get along — except there's a bit of backbiting because the staffs are competitive. Occasionally, they try to mess each other up.
This campaign may be Kennedy's last crusade, even if he runs for the Senate again and is re-elected in 2006. Having had a close-up view of the power of the presidency and having been denied it, no one understands better that the Senate is not the White House. Kennedy will turn 76 in the following presidential campaign. And much of what he believes in and has fought for will have been dismantled, diminished, or survived only under threat.
So the speech was as much for Kerry as it was for himself -- because in Kennedy's mind, “The work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die."
And as political indictments go, it was an artful pulling together of every thread of attack that the Democrats plan to use against Bush over the next seven months.
“I think this speech is, in fact, a distillation of the position the Democratic Party will take in the upcoming election,” announced Utah Republican Senator Robert Bennett the day after the speech.
The White House had a double-barreled response. First, it pointed out that Kennedy was the best man to deliver this kind of partisan message because he moves no votes and helps charge up their base. FOX News certainly affirmed that position. Secondly, the White House accused him of being a hatchet man for the Kerry campaign.
Bush and Co. might be right on both counts. Yet there may not be much comfort from it. That's because once again, they've found themselves in an unaccustomed place: on the defensive. It's a tough way to run a campaign. (It's also why every campaign needs a hatchet man.)
"Issuing personal attacks against the president is just another way of saying they have no agenda to lead America," Bush-Cheney re-election campaign spokesman Terry Holt told The Washington Post.
But the truest reaction may have come from Kennedy's GOP colleagues who spent the next three days responding to Kennedy.
On Tuesday, Senator Bennett provided the fear-and-loathing response. Bennett's father, Wallace F. Bennett, spent four terms in the Senate (1951 to 1973). The younger Bennett has a sonic boom for a voice and knows how to make a floor speech. The basic pattern is graciousness, puzzlement, and then outrage.
“I think it is important to realize how much we can get carried away with election-year rhetoric,” he said graciously, “and how personal we can get. And I salute Senator Kennedy -- in spite of the vigorousness of his attack on the administration -- for his decision to back away from personal attacks on the president.”
But Bennett was puzzled by the “hatred” Democrats felt toward President Bush.
“Former [Vermont] Governor [Howard] Dean certainly went in that direction in his attacks on the president,” Bennett said. “We've seen Senator Kerry in an unguarded moment refer to his opponents as a bunch of ‘lying crooks.' I would hope that we could back down from hatred as the primary theme of this campaign.”
He wasn't done, though. He was outraged by the tone and theme of Kennedy's speech, too.
“Basically,” Bennett went on, “it is rooted in fear and its derivative, pessimism. And that is what they are offering the American people: fear and pessimism.”
On Wednesday, Texas Republican Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison picked up the counterattack thread.
“I have to say I am troubled when I hear leaders say this is another Vietnam,” she said. “We have troops on the ground, in harm's way. Is it really productive for us to be labeling Iraq, after one year, as another Vietnam? Is it helpful to heap criticism on our president? Is it even helpful to be dissecting what happened in the run-up on the war on terrorism that began on September 11, 2001? Is it helpful to be saying who is at fault for bad information? Was it the Clinton administration or the Bush administration? Or was it before that? Is that what we ought to be talking about right now? I don't think so.”
Kennedy, of course, intends to keep the pressure on.
“The truth will prevail,” he said on Wednesday. “This policy on Iraq is a result of arrogance and misinformation. This policy is in shambles.”
He also shrugged off questions about whether he was harming the war effort.
“The troops have performed brilliantly, but the approach of this administration is to attack the messenger,” Kennedy added. “It is not going to work. I am proud to be on the list with General [Eric] Shinseki (who warned that the United States might need more troops in Iraq), Ambassador [Joseph] Wilson (who said that the administration cooked up evidence for the war and outed his secret-agent wife to punish him for saying that), and Mr. [Richard] Clarke (who said the administration did not pay enough attention to al-Qaeda and was obsessed with finding a reason to invade Iraq). If I have to stand with them, so be it.”
The hatchet man, taking a few swings.
Terence Samuel is the chief congressional correspondent for U.S. News & World Report. His column about politics appears each week in the online edition of The American Prospect.
