Ok, John Kerry said something stupid. Not as stupid as what Jessica Simpson said to Gale Norton, but pretty damn stupid. If he said it.
Anyway, he either actually said or implied that (a) he’d been talking to leaders in foreign nations about our elections, and that (b) he’d been told things in confidence, but would hint at them to a reporter.
I’m not sure whether I think it’s better if he’s lying. If he is, it’s just blather, and although it’s a stupid lie, it’s not the worst lie told by a presidential candidate this month. I’d rather Kerry said only useful, articulate things, and if he is going to lie, I’d rather that the lie helped him than hurt him. But as a lie, it’s not all that big a deal.
If, on the other hand, he is speaking loosely to foreign leaders, that’s a problem. I hold my candidate to a fairly high standard, and it seems to me that candidates or even potential candidates should not be holding those sorts of conversations. The only thing that is a sort-of saving grace is that he may well have meant leaders in rather than leaders of foreign countries; then it goes back to being a stupid thing to say, rather than a stupid thing to actually have done.
Finally, if somebody tells you something in confidence, you don’t talk about it. You just don’t. You don’t drop hints about it, and you surely don’t drop hints to reporters. Even if you are tired, and in a noisy airplane, and rambling beyond the normal bounds of sentence structure.
Digression: Have you Gentle Readers all seen The Candidate? Do you remember the scene in the back of the limo, after the forty-’leventh time he’s been through his stump speech, when he starts just babbling the words? “We can no long, no, no longer, play off, black against old, young against poor. This country cannot house its houseless, feed its ... foodless. blahbuhblahbuhblahbluhblah.” I get a lot of sympathy for politicians misstatements, even Gov. Dean’s misquote of his own ‘confederate flag’ bit, off of that one scene. End Digression.
Step it up, Senator. You have clearly run a terrific campaign so far; we can tell because you won. I think I can speak for many many many of us when we say, with our teeth all gritted and stuff, “Please. Don’t. Fuck. Up.”
Redintegro Iraq,
-Vardibidian.
The reporter who posted that story (Patrick Healy of the Boston Globe) has actually corrected his quote (though that correction hasn’t gotten nearly the coverage of the original). Apparently the tape was fairly inaudible at points, and he mis-transcribed it when he was writing up his story on the plane (a fairly noisy environment).
The actual phrase was apparently “more leaders” and not “foreign leaders”. So on the basis of the phrase, he could be referring to anybody from Blair to Karzai to his fellow Democrats in Congress.
And there’s some question as to whether he said “met” or “heard”, which suggests that, even stipulating that he was referring to foreign leaders (which the correction cited above calls into question), Kerry may have been working from second-hand reports from people who *had* met legitimately with said leaders.
Now that’s not to say that it was a sensible thing to say, but I don’t think it raises the same issues as the incorrect original quote…
Of course, the allegation now is that Mr. Healey has simply caved in to pressure, and that the original quote was accurate. The fact that the Senator didn’t deny the quote is used to support this. I suspect that the Senator was both rambling and mumbling, and that neither his listener or the Senator himself were sure what came out of his mouth. Which is a problem.
I linked, by the way, to the corrected text according to the Boston Globe. Although the corrected text is not as bad as the first, it was still a gaffe.
R.I.,
-V.