The John Kerry Post of the Day

My latest discovery about my favorite cheese-eating surrendermonkey-looking Ketchup King cum Presidential candidate:

Ah, John Kerry, the man who is at one with the common man. He even purues the same leisure-time activities that the rest of us do, as noted by ABC News' Noted Now...

Undeterred by the lack of wind that thwarted his plans to windsurf in Oregon on Saturday, Kerry said on his plane that he would return to Oregon from Idaho on Monday or Tuesday to windsurf on the Columbia River Gorge.

"Once a year I like to do something fun," he said.

Throughout his campaign, Kerry has made it clear that he is not ready to cede to President Bush what Steve Rosenthal, the former political director of the AFL-CIO, once called "the hang test."

So whether it's been shooting pheasant, playing hockey, tossing a football, or riding a Harley, Kerry has been presented to the public as fun-loving, athletic, outdoorsy, and, most importantly, the kind of Democrat who crosses the "testosterone threshold" needed to be commander-in-chief.

But the exotic nature of some of the sports he plays (say, kite-surfing in Nantucket) and the great lengths he goes in order to play them (say, flying from Idaho to Oregon to windsurf), can have the unintended effect of making him seem out of touch with the hard-pressed middle class whose cares he says have been his concern.

As his plane was flying from Oregon to Idaho on Saturday, Kerry defended his taste in sports, saying, "The guys who do it are all local guys -- plumbers, construction workers."

Asked if these regular folks fly from one state to another, the husband of the condiment heiress downplayed the cost, saying, "What? 250 bucks for a ticket?"

Luckily for Kerry, the moment was not on camera. But it was the kind of moment -- if captured on camera -- that could undo months of work. (Think of George H.W. Bush looking perplexed at a super-market scanner in 1992).

What's truly hysterical about this line is that this IS the real John Kerry, to the extent there is one. He's a pompous, arrogant snob who's accustomed to ahigh-class lifestlye. Not that we're saying this disqualifies someone from being President -- the 42nd President wasn't anything close to a snob, but he wasn't all that great a person either. So maybe a snob isn't the worst thing to be if you're President... but the American people tend not be impressed by snobbery.

Kerry's line about construction workers and plumbers betrays a certain inability to comprehend the obvious. To him, this sort of vacation is a normal pursuit, one he engages in several times a year. Once he'll fly to Oregon, another time he'll hit his ski chalet in Wyoming, another time he'll vacation in Nantucket. Most construction workers and plumbers who like to get out and ski may find time for one trip a year, but they're usually busy trying to pay off the mortgage and working the rest of the year. Well, unless they married multi-billionaire heiresses. Unfortunately, there aren't many of those around.

What's even funnier is the other lines in the article...

Sen. John Kerry, resting for three days in Ketchum, Idaho, is coming off of a warmly received 15-day post-convention tour that brought him into contact with 300,000 people in 17 states.

For starters, he appears to have grown as a candidate. Kerry, who once grumbled "Dean, Dean, Dean" into an open-mic in the fall of 2003 when the former Vermont governor was outshining him, doggedly talked about issues of local concern on this trip.

In just the past week, Kerry talked about health care for Native Americans in New Mexico, funding for National Parks in Arizona, blocking nuclear waste and lowering the cost of prescription drugs in Nevada, cutting taxes for the middle class in California, and a new CBO report he says shows that President Bush's tax cuts have greatly favored the wealthy.

Kerry was also nimble in responding to attacks from the other side. While Kerry was out on his tour, President Bush challenged him to answer "yes or no" to whether he -- knowing what he knows now -- would vote again to authorize the president to use force against Iraq. It was a question that Kerry had dodged in the past.

But while visiting the Grand Canyon on Monday, Kerry, perhaps feeling firm in his hold on Democrats opposed to the Iraq war, said, "Yes, I would have voted for the authority. I believe it was the right authority for a president to have." While holding firm to the need to hold Saddam Hussein "accountable," Kerry has also managed to step up his references to bringing the troops home. "I know what we need to do now to get the troops home," Kerry told a cheering crowd of thousands at UNLV on Tuesday after restating what he called his "consistent" support for standing up to Hussein.

Kerry's comments have blocked his opponents from easily painting him as a weak-kneed liberal while holding out hope for anti-war Democrats that a President Kerry would only go to war as a "last resort."

When Vice President Cheney mocked Kerry this week for having recently told a conference of minority journalists that he would fight a more "sensitive" war on terror, Kerry avoided being thrown on the defensive.

He told ABC's Dan Harris in Carson, California that it's "sad that they can only be negative." He reminded a crowd of 10,000 in Medford, Oregon that he defended his country as a young man "when others chose not to." And he told a man in Springfield, Oregon who was afraid to use the word sensitive because "George Bush had screwed that word up": "Don't for an instant be shy about using the word sensitive... If you don't speak your mind, you shouldn't be President of the United States. And I intend to be President of the United States."

Um, yeah. This heartland tour has been so brilliant that the polls haven't moved a whit, as noted by faithful reader RB. Yet the press desperately continues to try to portray Kerry as a man of the people, touching them enough that they're starting to fall for him. The press continues to ignore the Christmas in Cambodia story. Other than the estemmed Robert Novak in the Chicago Sun-Times and an odd article in papers like the Seattle Times, the mainstream press seems obsessed with ignoring the story or simply reporting about the controversy surrounding the ad put forth by the Swift Boat vets.

Or the press, as Chris Mathews put forth in his attack interview with John O'Neill last week, attempts to discredit the Swift Boat vets. Take special note of the sections in italics:

MATTHEWS: No, I mean, if a man shows any courage in the battlefield, he‘s done more than most people do in this country. He‘s gone out and fought for his country and risked his life for his country and shot one of the enemy for his country. That puts him a step above most people, doesn‘t it?

O‘NEILL: I think he is millions of steps behind, because he went over...

MATTHEWS: Behind whom?

O‘NEILL: Behind everybody.

MATTHEWS: You mean Bush? President Bush?

O‘NEILL: Yes. I‘m not going to speak to President Bush.

MATTHEWS: No, because you‘re out here as a proactive indicter of this guy‘s war record. You‘ve chosen to take this role, to write this book, to get these allies to make these case. You‘re a Republican from Texas. You‘re making this case against the guy. And I‘m simply saying, you can‘t just go out here and take these shots without being responded to by me. I‘m going to ask you, is he less a hero than Bush?

O‘NEILL: And I would like to answer, if you‘ll give me a chance.

MATTHEWS: Sure. Sure. Plenty of time. Take all the time you want.

O‘NEILL: First of all, I‘m not a Republican from Texas. That‘s just not true. Second, with respect to what he did, we don‘t challenge that he went ashore that day. With respect to overall, he had very limited accomplishments in the short period he was in Vietnam and he came back here and delivered almost a death blow to the U.S. military by lying.

MATTHEWS: OK, that‘s another issue. We‘ll get to that issue.

O‘NEILL: Just a second.

MATTHEWS: That‘s why you‘re mad at him.

O‘NEILL: Absolutely not. First of all, I believe that his comments and the war crimes claims back here were absolutely wrong. And I‘ll never forget those. Neither will the guys.

MATTHEWS: What war crimes?

O‘NEILL: His claims that U.S. troops committed war crimes on a day-to-day basis, that we were like Genghis Khan. But a wholly separate issue is, did exaggerate his service in Vietnam? And my answer to that is, clearly he did.

MATTHEWS: But you have a record going back yourself. But you go back to the Nixon era, when Nixon was looking for someone. Colson and those guys were looking for somebody to debunk the Kerry record, because all the records show they were scared to death of this guy. And you played that role. You close to play that role.

O‘NEILL: Once...

MATTHEWS: I‘m sorry. I don‘t want to get...

O‘NEILL: That‘s just not true.

MATTHEWS: By the way, disabuse the public who are watching right now what I‘m wrong about. Where do you live?

O‘NEILL: I live in Houston, Texas.

MATTHEWS: OK, you‘re a Texan. Have you voted Democrat recently for president?

O‘NEILL: Absolutely. I haven‘t voted for a Republican since 1988. As a matter of fact, I just backed the Democratic mayor of Houston, Bill White.

MATTHEWS: OK, so you‘ve voted—you‘re generally a Republican or a Democrat when it comes to voting for president?

O‘NEILL: It depends on the person, Chris.

MATTHEWS: Did you vote for Clinton?

O‘NEILL: No, actually.

MATTHEWS: Did you vote for Gore?

O‘NEILL: I voted for Perot twice.

MATTHEWS: OK. Did you vote for Gore?

O‘NEILL: I voted for Gore. I voted for Gore. I don‘t know really why I should go into my voting record.

MATTHEWS: No, because it comes down to the question. We‘re going over the issue here of you going after a guy‘s war record and admitting he was courageous in battle, but then arguing about the nature of the way he was awarded the Silver Star. I‘m just wondering why you‘re doing this.

O‘NEILL: Well, the reason I‘m doing it is, he wildly exaggerated two things. He wildly exaggerated his record, which...

MATTHEWS: Well, let‘s start with that. We‘re going down the record.

O‘NEILL: Can I finish answering the question?

The next time some idiot claims O'Reilly is unfair to his guests, remember this passage. It's scary how offended Mathews is by the mere implication that some of Kerry's own fellow veterans would have the nerve to question his war record. He actively jumps to Kerry's defense, and does so by engaging in the same pathetic attacks on the credibility of O'Neill, who's merely chronicled the tales of his fellow vets. We're just supposed to take it on faith that John Kerry's telling the truth! The critical viewpoint of him is simply not worthy of examination.

Yet most mainstream news outlets like the Washington Post, CNN and the left-wing dishrag had absolutely no qualms about handing out positive reviews to Michael Moore's crockumentary, which had more questionable facts than anything put forth by the Swift Boat Vets. But we're sitting here, at least one week after the Cambodia story became major news, and these places try to dismiss the story or ignore it.

Which basically leaves it to the blogosphere to publicize... and build a rumor mill that may end up hurting Kerry more than anything. After all, Unfit for Command is still #1 on the best-seller list at Amazon. The press can't ignore it forever, which is why the Seattle Times picked up the aforementioned piece by Knight-Ridder. But don't expect the press to give up now. As Evan Thomas of Newsweek noted last month:

There's one other base here, the media. Let's talk a little media bias here. The media, I think, wants Kerry to win and I think they're going to portray Kerry and Edwards I'm talking about the establishment media, not Fox. They're going to portray Kerry and Edwards as being young and dynamic and optimistic and there's going to be this glow about them, collective glow, the two of them, that's going to be worth maybe 15 points.

And with those fifteen points, he's in a dead heat. Great campaign, Senator.