From tonight’s listings for Larry King: Plus, Sen. John Kerry on his Iraq joke gone wrong.
Whether Kerry will become a viable candidate for the 2008 nomination depends partially upon whether he can get beyond the unfavorable publicity caused by a poorly written joke which was even more poorly delivered. Kerry has no choice but to appear on shows like this to explain, but it is sure a shame. The country would be far better served by listening to John Kerry’s ideas for getting out of the Iraq war gone bad, as well as his ideas on making health care more affordable, and for strengthening small business.
There is a lot of time between now and the IA caucuses. The negative effect will pass as time goes by. Most dems don’t care about the fact that Kerry missed the word “us” in his joke about Bush. Shows like Fox News Sunday and Larry King are meant to appeal to a decidedly repug leaning audience. He is there to talk about it and to defend himself. He will be fine. King is not half as venomous as Wallace. Kerry can pull through this. This joke didn’t affect the midterm elections and it won’t hurt Kerry down the road.
Probius,
There are really two issues here.
First there’s the controversy over whether Kerry attacked the troops. Most people now realize this is untrue. Conservatives will continue to falsely claim Kerry attacked the troops. However, if they didn’t have this there’s all the other comments from him which they have twisted.
The second issue is how Kerry handles attacks. At first it looked like he might benefit because it showed he would respond to right wing attacks, but at the moment the conventional wisdom is that he handled this poorly. Kerry was somewhat handicapped in responding as he didn’t want to drag down other Democrats before the election. The question now is how people resond to his media appearances.
While hardly the most important issue in picking a candidate, I was a little disappointed in the speed in which they resonded. It wasn’t bad by old media standards, but was slow in today’s climate. I fear his staff doesn’t totally understand the how the new media works. I knew well over twelve hours before the story broke in the media that we had a problem because of monitoring the conservative blogs. The attacks started on the blogs, and then got picked up by the media later. The first responses I saw from Kerry’s office were after this hit the media. In this day and age a candidate must have staffers monitoring the media, including the blogs and right wing media, around the clock and be ready with a response before the bad news even hits the mainstream media.
As unfortunate as it is, who ever wins in 2008 won’t necessarily be the candidate who is most qualified or who has the best ideas for the country, but who best understands how to handle the new media. Simply seeing the attacks as soon as they hit the right wing blogs and responding by showing the prepared text to demonstrate it was a joke about Bush could have stopped this before it became an issue. While I wouldn’t expect Kerry to discuss this on Larry King, I hope he learned a lesson here and improves how his staffers handle the new media.
Ron,
You make excellent points. It could be said that Kerry’s team didn’t anticipate how big this story would get when he first came out and said that he wouldn’t apologize. It can be said that he didn’t handle it properly as well as he should have. You are right, Kerry’s was restricted in how he responded to the attacks. Dems like Dean, Schumer and Reid were eager to have him not talk about it anymore. Perhaps that’s why he doing these TV interviews now because he couldn’t do them at the time due to the midterm elections.
You are also right to say that the response was inadequate in this day of instant news. The response was slow. Hopefully next time it will be faster. Kerry will have to learn how to respond to attacks instantly and in a way that fully answers the attacks.
“Simply seeing the attacks as soon as they hit the right wing blogs and responding by showing the prepared text to demonstrate it was a joke about Bush could have stopped this before it became an issue.” This is an accurate assessment. Kerry should hire people to monitor these right-wing blogs.
Kerry did very well today. Kerry should definitely do more of these interviews. This is the ideal forum for him. At one stroke he can reach millions of people. At the time the poll was taken he had not done any TV interviews. So this is the right kind of platform for him to address the relevant issues.