ANOTHER SEARED – SEARED – MEMORY From a John Kerry speech commemorating Martin Luther King Day, January 20, 2003:

I remember well April 1968 – I was serving in Vietnam – a place of violence – when the news reports brought home to me and my crewmates the violence back home – and the tragic news that one of the bullets flying that terrible spring took the life of that unabashedly maladjusted citizen. In fact, Mr. Kerry did not go to Vietnam until November 1968.

THAT 1970S SHOW “I called the media….I said, ‘If I take some crippled veterans down to the White House and we chain ourselves to the gates, will we get coverage?’ ‘Oh, yes, we will cover that.’ ” John Kerry, testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, April 22, 1971

“Kerry is sending to Crawford former Sen. Max Cleland of Georgia, a frequent companion of Kerry’s on the campaign trail and a fellow Vietnam War veteran who lost three limbs during the war. Cleland…will try to deliver a letter protesting the [Swift Boat Veterans for Truth] ads to [President] Bush at his heavily guarded ranch, Kerry aides said.” -Reuters, August 25, 2004

THE CHUTZPAH CAMPAIGN You almost have to admire the shamelessness with which Senator Kerry and his supporters in the press and elsewhere are dealing with the whole Vietnam question. Here’s the latest, from an Associated Press dispatch on a Philadelphia campaign appearance yesterday: At the fund-raiser, Kerry defended his anti-war activism as “an act of conscience.”

“You can judge my character, incidentally, by that,” Kerry said. “Because when the time for moral crisis existed in this country, I wasn’t taking care of myself, I was taking care of public policy. I was taking care of things that made a difference to the life of this nation. You may not have agreed with me, but I stood up and was counted and that’s the kind of president I’m going to be.” Yet at the same time, he is waging a smear campaign against a group of Vietnam veterans who are using his antiwar activism to make a judgment about the kind of president he would be. Then there’s the whole effort to paint the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth as a part of the Bush campaign, which would be illegal under the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law. The latest “connection” the pro-Kerry press has discovered is that a lawyer, Benjamin Ginsburg, counts both the campaign and the Swift Boat Veterans among his clients. “Attorney Works for Bush, Anti-Kerry Group,” reads the Associated Press headline. And from the New York Times: “Bush Campaign’s Top Outside Lawyer Advised Veterans Group.” Mr. Ginsburg tendered his resignation Wednesday to defuse the controversy. Yet if you read the articles all the way through, you find that this is either a complete non-story or something of which both sides are equally guilty. Here are the final two paragraphs of the AP dispatch:

Joe Sandler, a lawyer for the [Democratic National Committee] and a group running anti-Bush ads, MoveOn.org, said there is nothing wrong with serving in both roles at once.

In addition to the [Federal Elections Commission’s] coordination rules, attorneys are ethically bound to maintain attorney-client confidentiality, Sandler said. They could lose their law license if they violate that, he said. And here’s the fourth paragraph of the Times piece:

The campaign of Senator John Kerry shares a lawyer, Robert Bauer, with America Coming Together, a liberal group that is organizing a huge multimillion-dollar get-out-the-vote drive that is far more ambitious than the Swift boat group’s activities. Mr. Ginsberg said his role was no different from Mr. Bauer’s.

When the Times asks a Kerry spokesman about Bauer, he evades the question:

“It’s another piece of evidence of the ties between the Bush campaign and this group,” Chad Clanton, a spokesman for Mr. Kerry, said. Asked about his campaign’s use of shared lawyers, Mr. Clanton said, “If the Bush campaign truly disapproved of this smear, their top lawyer wouldn’t be involved.”

Yet the Times still put the story on the front page with a headline suggesting that the Bush campaign is guilty of something. Doesn’t the paper have any concern about its own credibility as a disinterested provider of news?

WILL COLORADO FLUNK COLLEGE? ASPEN, Colo.- As long as we’re visiting the Centennial State, we thought we’d write something about the initiative that will appear on the November ballot to change the way Colorado allocates its electoral votes. The Colorado Electoral College Reform Initiative would allocate the state’s 9 electoral votes proportionately to each candidate’s popular vote, and it would be retroactive to the 2004 election. Currently, the candidate who wins a plurality of the popular vote gets all of the state’s electors, as is the case in 47 other states and the District of Columbia. (Maine and Nebraska allocate 2 electoral votes to the statewide winner and the remaining votes by congressional district, though neither has had a split since adopting this method.) The initiative is a transparent effort to help Senator Kerry, who is expected to lose Colorado. If it had been in effect in 2000, Vice President Gore would have picked up 3 of the state’s 8 electoral votes (one has been added since, thanks to reapportionment).This would have shifted the overall electoral vote from 271-266 in Bush’s favor to 270-268 in Gore’s. (One Gore elector from the District of Columbia abstained but said she would have cast her vote for Gore if it had been decisive.) If Kerry took 3 or 4 of Colorado’s electors this year, that could make the difference in a close election. But Coloradans would have to be pretty stupid to approve this measure, for the result would be to diminish the state’s power in electing a president. To see why, consider this: In postwar elections, the Democrats have never received less than 31.1% of the Colorado vote (President Carter’s total in 1980). The Republicans’ worst showing was George H.W. Bush’s 35.9% in 1992. If we take this as each party’s floor, Democrats would have a lock on 2 of Colorado’s electoral votes and Republicans on 3 of them, leaving a maximum of 4 electoral votes in play in any given election – the number of electoral votes such small states as Hawaii, Idaho and New Hampshire have. And winning all 4 of those votes (for a 7-2 GOP advantage or a 6-3 Democratic one) would require a blowout victory in the state. The Bush campaign is concerned enough about Colorado that it has been airing campaign ads here, something we never see back home in solidly Democratic New York. It’s unlikely that either candidate would bother to campaign in a state where at most 4, and more realistically only 1 or 2, electoral votes are at stake. What would happen if every state adopted the proposed Colorado system? For one thing, “swing” states would be a thing of the past; the difference between carrying Iowa and losing it by a small plurality would be 1 electoral vote (4-3 vs. 3-4) rather than 7. This would benefit large states at the expense of small ones. It’s a lot easier to shift, say, 3.2% of the vote in New York (which has 31 electoral votes) than 25% in New Hampshire (4). It would also increase the importance of third parties, thereby possibly pushing the major parties to extremes. No third-party candidate has carried a state since George Wallace in 1968, but under a proportional system for choosing electors, several would have won electoral votes. We ran the numbers for the 2000 election, and it turns out that if all states followed the proposed Colorado system, Ralph Nader would have garnered 6 electoral votes (2 from California and 1 each from Massachusetts, Ohio, New York and Texas). Mr. Gore would have outpolled Mr. Bush, 268-264, but neither candidate would have had a 270-vote majority. If Mr. Gore was unable to persuade two Nader electors to break ranks and vote for him – which presumably would have entailed policy concessions to their far-left agenda – the election would have been thrown to the House. We haven’t run the numbers for 1992, but it’s unlikely that President Clinton’s 43% popular-vote plurality would have translated into an electoral majority under a proportional system. In the long run, this initiative would be bad for Colorado as a whole. Even in the short run, it benefits only the candidate who fails to carry the state, and by definition he does not command a majority of voters. So we’d be very surprised if Coloradans were foolish enough to pass this misguided measure.

THIS JUST IN “Electoral College Holds Key to Election, Again” -headline, Centre Daily Times (State College, Pa.), August 24

YOU DON’T SAY “Late Fees Add to Credit Card Expense” – headline, Associated Press, August 25

A ONE-SENTENCE FLIP-FLOP “The truth, which is what elections are all about, is that the tax burden of the middle class has gone up while the tax burden of the middle class has gone down.”-Senator Kerry, quoted by the Associated Press, August 25

This column is adapted from the Best of the Web, which is issued daily at OpinionJournal.com. (C)2004 Dow Jones and Company Inc.