THE KERRY SCANDAL: My first
THE KERRY SCANDAL: My first reaction to revelations that John Kerry may have had at least one marital infidelity? Who cares? It's no one's business but his own and his family's, and the same thing didn't keep either Clinton or Ah-nuld from winning elections. My second reaction? I knew about this years ago.
I had various friends in college who were involved with Democratic politics in Massachusetts, and I heard stories all the time about Kerry affairs- one classmate of mine met the Senator at a formal event and he spent the entire conversation staring at her cleavage. More specifically, one friend of mine in particular remembered a Boston Herald "Inside Track" gossip piece from 1998 about young women being seen leaving Kerry's residence late at night (that piece was found and blogged about today by Mickey Kaus). Funny, with Lexis-Nexis available, that no one had come across this before- this wasn't 25 years ago, it was 6 years ago.
At about 5:00 yesterday afternoon, I sent the following e-mail to my aforementioned friend:
Bush may be in trouble after all... Unless, of course, some of those Kerry womanizing stories start to come out. It's only matter of time, right?
I was only off by about 12 hours.
How is it possible that I knew about this, but none of the national press corps or opposing campaign operatives did? Now, perhaps members of the press knew and didn't reveal it, but opposing campaigns? This must be new information to them, or else it would have come out a long time ago, I'd imagine.
A couple other strange things: the existence of the story was supposedly revealed the other day by Wesley Clark, mere days before Clark dropped out- and endorsed Kerry. You've gotta think that subhuman reptilian slimeball consultant Chris Lehane, who formerly worked for Kerry and then jumped to Clark, must've had something to do with it.
And finally, Drudge ran the story in the mid-morning today, and the major blogs have all been all over it- but as of this writing (7 PM) there's
nothing in the mainstream media- not on the New York Times or Washington Post websites, not on CNN- and (surprisingly) even Fox News has ignored it, as Brit Hume's panel danced around the story for 20 minutes, with Morton Kondracke even speculating that Kerry's emphasis of Bush's AWOL situation was a "preemptive strike against what's to come."
We'll likely hear more about this in the next few days, and it's unfortunate that this story will likely overshadow the historic debate over same-sex marriage going on this week in Massachusetts. But having just the other day watched the '92 election documentary "The War Room," I'm convinced this sort of thing won't hurt Kerry any more than it did Clinton. Unless, of course, Teresa Heinz goes through with her threat to "maim" her husband if he ever cheated on her.
Posted by Stephen Silver at February 12, 2004 07:06 PM