Month: December 2006

The Boston Globe reports that John Kerry has decided to postpone the decision on his expected run for the presidency in 2008. Sources claim that the fallout of calling servicemen lazy idiots has stunned him:

Senator John F. Kerry’s election-eve “botched joke” about the war in Iraq — and the fierce denunciations his comments drew from fellow Democrats — has led him to reevaluate whether to mount a run for the presidency in 2008 and has led him to delay an announcement about his decision, according to Kerry associates.
The Massachusetts Democrat is now leaning toward waiting until late spring before declaring his intentions, even as other candidates jump into the race and begin building organizing and fund-raising teams in early-primary states. Before the joke derailed his comeback, Kerry had signaled that he would decide whether to run by the end of January.
Kerry — who had methodically resurrected his political standing after a tough loss to President Bush in 2004 — was stunned by the swift, angry reaction to his Oct. 30 statement that underachieving students would end up “stuck in Iraq.” Aides and friends say the senator was particularly stung by the fact that so many Democrats had joined Republicans in rebuking him.
The incident laid bare to the senator the lingering skepticism and resentment of him two years after he failed to unseat Bush, according to Kerry advisers who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Oh, please. This is just more spin from Kerry’s crew. What the incident revealed wasn’t “lingering skepticism and resentment” from his incompetent campaign against Bush in 2004. Fellow Democrats hardly bother to hide both even to this day. What got the Democrats angry, except for Charles Rangel, is that it fed into the image of Democrats as elitist snobs that sneer at the military and the men and women that comprise it. He tried to pass it off as a joke about George Bush, which didn’t make any sense since (a) Bush has an MBA and obviously pursued his education, (b) he got slightly better grades than John Kerry did as an undergraduate, and (c) both of them volunteered for the service.
And thanks to Rangel, the damage isn’t done yet. Rangel insisted on extending the damage during his Fox News appearance last week, in which he claimed that anyone with any potential for a career wouldn’t dream of enlisting in the armed forces. Democrats reacted in milder tones to Rangel’s statement, probably because Rangel isn’t running for president.
Besides, the entire idea of another Kerry run at the White House is its own botched joke. Kerry, who got selected in the aftermath of Howard Dean’s primary meltdown because of his supposed electability, turned out to be an absolutely atrocious candidate. He never reconciled his Winter Soldier days of accusing American troops of being the equivalent of the soldiers in the army of Genghis Khan, the testimony that launched his political career. Kerry tried making Bush’s Air National Guard service an issue in the campaign, and then screeched like an old woman when his own service record came under scrutiny. That he came within 4 points of Bush only demonstrated the opportunity the Democrats had to retake the White House, had they nominated someone even marginally competent at campaigning.
Kerry only postpones the immaterial in this delay. The Democratic Party wouldn’t nominate him again even if he was the last Democrat in the nation. The longer he pretends otherwise, the more pathetic he becomes.

The latest story on Mitt Romney has the appearance of an early opposition attack on his presidential hopes, and in this case a rather silly attack. Echoing the travails of Kimba Wood, Bill Clinton’s first nominee for Attorney General, the Boston Globe reported yesterday that Romney employed illigal immigrants as landscaping workers:

As Governor Mitt Romney explores a presidential bid, he has grown outspoken in his criticism of illegal immigration. But, for a decade, the governor has used a landscaping company that relies heavily on workers like these, illegal Guatemalan immigrants, to maintain the grounds surrounding his pink Colonial house on Marsh Street in Belmont.
The Globe recently interviewed four current and former employees of Community Lawn Service with a Heart, the tiny Chelsea-based company that provides upkeep of Romney’s property. All but one said they were in the United States illegally.

Wood had to withdraw her nomination when reporters discovered that she had not paid her nanny’s Social Security taxes as required by law. Now the Globe somehow stumbles across information that Romney, who opposes illegal immigration, dodged the law in favor of his lawn. However, the two aren’t the same, and Romney’s response points that out:

Responding to a report in Friday’s Boston Globe, the governor’s communications director said Friday that Romney was unaware that several of the landscapers who kept up his suburban Belmont property were in this country illegally.
“Gov. Romney has no information or knowledge to corroborate the Globe’s allegations,” Eric Fehrnstrom said Friday. “He hired a legitimate lawn service company and he knows the owner as a decent, hardworking person who is a legal resident.”

Romney hired a firm to maintain his landscaping, by all accounts a legitimate firm that also does business with public agencies in Massachussetts. Romney had no input on their hiring decisionsm, and he had no obligation — and no right — to demand “papers” from the employees of the firm when they arrived on his property. He naturally assumed that Community Lawn Service with a Heart had followed the law when it hired its workers, given their references.
Let’s think about the reverse for a moment. Had Romney demanded that the workers present proof of eligibility to work before allowing them on his property, how would the Boston Globe have reported that? Would they have hailed him as a paragon of steadfastness against illegal immigration? Or would they have reported him as a racist who just assumes all Hispanics must be in the country illegally? Instead of interviewing the three or four illegals in the firm, the Globe would have found three or four proper citizens just trying to make a living that felt Romney’s supposed racism.
Romney has no reason to apologize. He relied on his contractor to follow the law. If people want to hold Romney accountable for that, then I suggest that the Boston Herald start interviewing the Boston Globe’s janitorial staff and landscaping services to determine whether their contractors have the same issue. After that, some enterprising blogger could follow the executives of the Boston Globe (owned by the New York Times) to see at which restaurants they eat and at which golf courses they play to determine whether they have carefully scrutinized all of these places to ensure no illegals work there.