So I've never really liked Senator Kerry (see here, here, and here(at least not since 1973 and I wasn't born, so its retrospective admiration) but his latest comments are especially stupid to me. Understand, I don't play the soundbite of the week game. I don't really worry or stress over the many minor misstatements politicians make and am pretty well willing to give them a pass since they have to make so many public statements that its inevitable something stupid will slip out now and again. And I do think that the Swift Boat Veterans Campaign is an intentional deception, which is despicable and would certainly not be tolerated from the left (certainly, the activities of the SBVFT are worse than Kerry's comments).
But Kerry's comments Monday betray something more than stupidity.
And the contortions most "big D" Democrats are going through to "revise and extend" the Senator's remarks are laughable. You should have seen this or heard of it by now, but if not, here's youtube to the rescue . How can this reasonably be construed as a joke about the President? It requires some serious backflips.
1) The Senator is addressing a community college audience. The you is a collective plural you addressed to the audience. So he's saying, if you don't study hard, then when you're elected President you might get the country into an unpopular war?
2) This is not delivered as a "joke". True, Kerry is not world's most dynamic public speaker. But this is what a "joke" from Kerry looks like (skip ahead to between 6:30 and 7:00).
3) If you don't work hard you become President? Not to mention, this President is one of the most educated we've had (with an MBA). (Understand this is not a judgement on his effectiveness at the job, but that's a particularly bad target for criticism.)
4) The official line is that this joke was a criticism of Bush's march to the Iraq war. So Kerry is claiming that Bush's poor study habits lead to the war. But as numerous right-wing bloggers have pointed out defiantly, Bush was a better student than Kerry.
Either way you read it, its a stupid comment. But to claim its a Bush joke strains credulity. It has precisely the ring of truth as that of Rush Limbaugh (half)retracting his Michael J. Fox comments as a misunderstanding. I think its also instructive that though the Senator has claimed it was taken out of context, there has been no effort to release any tape of the address in full (believe me I've looked). Of course, the (big R) Republicans haven't spent any time looking for the full text either, as both sides are more interested in the story they want to create rather than reality.
I think the reasonable explanation is that he was commenting on the long historical truism that the poorest citizens of the country are the hardest hit by wars, whether the war itself is just or not. This has been true of the US all the way back to the Revolutionary War (in which most of those doing the fighting were not allowed to vote because they did not own property), and all countries before.
And despite the many comments about how educated our military is (certainly true), (almost) all those grad and post-doc degrees are amongst the officers. The greatest burden (in terms of loss of life, which I think everyone can agree is the highest price to pay) is faced by the enlisted servicemembers (Approximately 92% calculated from this site and 18% under the age of 21). So yes, the service members who are dying in the largest numbers tend not to be college educated. But that certainly doesn't imply not studying hard enough.
It was an attempt (ham-handed like most of these over the years) to show his "populist appeal" looking out for the "little guy". But he's so insulated and priveleged, that he doesn't get that you don't fight for the underpriveleged by telling them that you'll look out for them because they're too stupid to do it themselves. He is absolutely an elitist. Again the point and the social issue is NOT that these people didn't STUDY HARD ENOUGH. Its that they had the misfortune of not having parents who could get them into Harvard and Yale, lived in an area that was economically depressed without job prospects and went to the tried and true route of military service. I don't suggest that this lack of options makes their choices less patriotic and I certainly don't suggest that it makes them less intelligent or lazy. I merely suggest that this lack of options makes them more likely to die in Iraq. If Kerry wants to talk about something, that's what he should be saying.
Of course, many choose military service without any of these factors coming into play. And every death in Iraq is not part of the cost of economic disadvantage. But there is a real argument to be made about how military action disproportionately affects the poor (as well as the criminal justice system, but that's a whole other article), and insulting those who serve is no way to advance it. To fight for someone, you have to have some respect for them. And in suggesting that people who end up in bad situations do so because of their own fault for being lazy shows no respect. In fact, it makes him sound like a (big R) Republican.
Notes:
But then again, maybe I'm just in a bad mood. What do YOU think?
Website of US Military Casualties in Iraq
Larger site of US Military Casualties through History
Update:
1Nov 1810 I've since (finally) scene a clip where they extend his remarks to before the comment but not after. To paraphrase, he makes a Bush joke about not living in the state of Texas but the state of Denial. (hilarious) Then he breaks and says (paraphrasing)
You know, we're here to talk about education, but let me say this. At this point he moves into the infamous section.
"You know education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, 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."
Updated Update:
1Nov 1840
OK, finally found the full text before and after so you can skip the paraphrasing above (though i was pretty close from memory, eh?)
Bottom line for me: Nothing I see here makes me think its out of context. And the audible gasp from the audience after he says makes it pretty clear that they didn't think he meant the President. But there is a little smile afterword, which makes it more ghoulish if it wasn't an incredibly insipid Bush joke.
Posted by ktismael at November 1, 2006 11:12 AM