Kerry's Response

Last week, after the big media finally noticed the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the Kerry campaign decided to respond to the ads. But having no real arguments against what the Swifties were saying, the Kerry campaign decided to attack the people conveying the message. Additionally, Kerry, parroting the New York Times article of last week has attacked the Bush campaign for allegedly being behind these ads because of its "connections" with the main contributors to the Swifties. And Kerry has demanded that Bush tell the SBVFT to take down the ads. This last demand is disingenuous at best. Someone in the Kerry must know that campaigns can't coordinate with the 527 groups, either positively or negatively; that is, just as the Bush campaign can't tell a 527 when and where they should put up an ad, they can't tell them to take an ad down either.

Using the same arguments that the Kerry campaign has made regarding Bush connections to SBVFT, one can show the clear Kerry connections to such 527s as MoveOn.org. Blogs for Bush has a great chart of the connections. Additionally, if this report from the American Spectator is correct, the Kerry campaign has been in violation of the campaign finance laws.

In fact, according to a Kerry campaign volunteer, staff members and volunteers of the Kerry campaign in New York, Washington, and Los Angeles have been in almost constant contact with MoveOn.org staffers, including advanced viewing and reviews of MoveOn.org television commercials, online ads, and web content. As well, MoveOn.org staffers provided the Kerry campaign with opposition research within the past two months, as well as advance looks at speeches made by MoveOn.org speakers, including former Vice President Al Gore.

"We're always running into those guys," says a Kerry campaign volunteer in Washington, about MoveOn.org staffers. "We socialize with them, we see them at meetings, we can't avoid it. And of course we talk about the campaign. In some cities, we get our volunteers from MoveOn. No one has ever raised an issue about it."

Of course, I don't expect the "mainstream" media to ever point out something like this.