Robert Caldwell:
"I'm a liberal and proud of it."
Sen. John Kerry to the St. Louis Post Dispatch, 1991"Labels don't mean anything."
Sen. John Kerry in the second debate with President Bush, 2004
Unfortunately for Democrat John Kerry, labels DO mean something. Kerry's career-long affiliation with a political ideology built on big government, high taxes and a weak record on national defense and foreign policy is the ball and chain shackled to his presidential campaign. It's George W. Bush's ace in the hole in the president's drive to persuade an evenly divided electorate that Kerry is out of step with mainstream political values and represents a risk not worth taking.
Kerry's strategy, so evident in all three presidential debates, is to disown liberalism. In its place, Kerry would have us believe that he's a centrist anchored squarely in the middle of the American political spectrum. That's not what the abundantly documented record of Kerry's 19 years in the U.S. Senate shows.
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On defense and foreign policy, Kerry promises a bigger Army and a more effective war against terrorism, assuming that any U.S. military action passes his undefined "global test." But Kerry's newly acquired advocacy of a larger, stronger military clashes glaringly with his two-decade record of voting against 40 of the weapons systems that currently arm America's forces.
As for Kerry's global test, recall 1991. Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait and threatened to seize a quarter of the world's oil reserves. Thirty-four nations, including a half dozen Arab countries, had joined the United States in sending military forces to the Persian Gulf to liberate Kuwait. The United Nations Security Council had voted to authorize military action. Then-President George H.W. Bush asked Congress to approve the use of force. The impeccably liberal John Kerry voted no.
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