A gaffe by the former Democratic presidential candidate, John Kerry, put his party on the defensive on Tuesday night when it was seized on by United States President George Bush as evidence of lack of patriotism over the Iraq war, a week before congressional elections.
Senator Kerry told an audience of college students in California that if they did not study hard they could ”get stuck in Iraq”, a comment quickly denounced by Bush as implying that US troops were uneducated.
Senator Kerry, who lost to Bush in the 2004 election, later said the line had been a ”botched joke” aimed at the president; an aide explained that it had been intended to mean that Bush’s intellectual laziness had led the country into war but had been ”mangled in delivery”.
But the president and his party, in danger of losing Congress next Tuesday, sought to make the comment into the talking point of the campaign.
”Even in the midst of a heated campaign season, there are still some things we should all be able to agree on; and one of the most important is that every one of our troops deserves our gratitude and respect,” Bush said. ”The senator’s suggestion that the men and women of our military are somehow uneducated is insulting and shameful.”
Kerry hit back at what he called White House distortion, arguing it was ”a remarkable testament to their abject failure in making America safe”. Kerry, a Vietnam war hero, said he rejected criticism from ”Republican hacks, who have never worn the uniform of our country”.
Some Democrats defended the senator, but others privately cringed. An unnamed Democratic congressman told ABC News: ”I guess Kerry wasn’t content blowing 2004, now he wants to blow 2006, too.”
According to local press accounts of Monday’s speech, Kerry told students at Pasadena city college: ”You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard and you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.”
The Kerry slip played into the White House’s strategy of questioning the Democrats’ national security credentials in the closing days of the elections. In a speech in Georgia on Monday, Bush said that a Democratic win would hand victory to Iraqi insurgents. ”However they put it, the Democrat approach in Iraq comes down to this: the terrorists win and America loses,” he said. ”The Democrat goal is to get out of Iraq. The Republican goal is to win in Iraq.” Vice-President Dick Cheney told Fox News that the insurgents in Iraq were timing attacks according to the US election calendar.
”It’s my belief that they’re very sensitive of the fact that we’ve got an election scheduled,” he said. ”Whether it’s al-Qaeda, or the other elements that are active in Iraq, they are betting on the proposition that they can break the will of the American people.”
The combative approach marks a shift in this election when Democrats have led the debate on Iraq, while Republicans have tried to avoid the topic. – Guardian Unlimited Â