The Bush campaign makes a simple but important point about John Kerry:
Throughout this campaign, Kerry has peppered his political attacks on the President with nuggets about his "experience" on the Senate Intelligence Committee, but he failed to show up for 76% of its public hearings.
The Boston Herald says the Bush campaign has landed a "solid blow."
We don't normally get too worked up about an elected official's attendance record at congressional committee meetings. The real work of legislating often gets done elsewhere. But given the weight Kerry himself has given his congressional experience with intelligence oversight and his stated desire to "reform the intelligence system," his record of missing 76 percent of public Senate Intelligence Committee hearings - and every one in the year after the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center - is surely fair game.
The Kerry campaign counter-attacks, but doesn't actually cite alternative attendance statistics.
The Bush-Cheney Campaign is using misleading numbers and cannot pretend to have the facts. They rely only on whether Sen. Kerry made statements in one of a small number of open hearings... They rely only on whether Sen. Kerry made statements in one of seven open hearings.NBC's Andrea Mitchell asked Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Pat Roberts, and Democratic Rep. Jane Harman, about it on Meet the Press. Both replies were telling:
SEN. ROBERTS: Well, it's in a closed hearing. But here's the point. Jane Harman and Pat Roberts sat there day after day after day in the original 9/11 investigation hearings. Presence, being there, is extremely important. I found out in my eight years, especially the first two, that you really had to get up ahead of the curve to understand what is going on. The easiest way out of this is for John Kerry and John Edwards to request of Senator Rockefeller and myself to release the attendance hearings; not only the public hearings, which they have rebutted, but the closed hearings.Now, we have a lot of members on the committee. We have 17. That's probably too many. That's one of the things we'd like to fix, to cut down the number. But I'm not going to get into that because it is a committee rule that has to be approved by the vice chairman and the chairman in terms of attendance.
MS. MITCHELL: Well, has he been a hard-working member?
SEN. ROBERTS: They should request it. They should...
MS. MITCHELL: Because that's one of the credentials he cites in his campaign.
SEN. ROBERTS: Well, hard-working member is in the eyes of the beholder. I'm just saying that John Kerry and John Edwards could ask Jay and myself to release the attendance records. It is important because you have to be in attendance to learn the job.
MS. MITCHELL: Congresswoman, you are the ranking Democrat on the House side. How would you feel if some of your members showed up as infrequently as Senator Kerry and Senator Edwards have?
REP. HARMAN: Well, I don't know what the facts are on the Senate side. I really can't speak to that, and I think we'll just have to wait and see.
It would appear that the Bushies have done their homework and Kerry's team is stuck with a feeble defense. ABC News The Note says:
The Kerry campaign's interest in revealing Kerry's private attendance record is on par with the candidate's traveling press corps' interest in getting them to come clean.
There is even some evidence that the Kerry campaign staff doesn't actually know whether they are working for Kerry or Kerrey.
Blogs of War may in fact know where Kerry has been. If true, then voters should demand that Magic Mountain release its surveillance tapes. Full disclosure is the only way to settle it.
Posted by Alan at August 17, 2004 08:41 PM