War Is Diverting Kerry’s Attacks on Fiscal Front

The presumptive Democratic nominee for president came for a town hall meeting Thursday to talk about fiscal responsibility, not dead young men and the spiral of violence in Iraq.

But on the way to the budget, John F. Kerry diverged from his campaign script, as he did at a riverbank rally in Cincinnati on Tuesday, at a major address in Washington on Wednesday and here in the hardscrabble heart of Wisconsin on Thursday.

“I saw on television before I came in here the images ... of a tank being hit by a rocket RPG,” Kerry told a rapt audience in the bright gymnasium of a YMCA. “The images of the wounded, our soldiers, our young men, scrambling out of the tank, bloody.”

The Massachusetts senator spoke of the sorrowful father of Pfc. Ryan Jerabek, 18, of Hobart, Wis., one of 15 young men from this political battleground state who went to their deaths on a far different battleground.

Jerabek was killed on Tuesday in Ramadi, and his fresh face adorned the front page of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel two days later. Jerabek’s father, Kerry said, is a Vietnam veteran who didn’t want his son to go to war.

The son went. The father grieves. The nation, Kerry said, honors their sacrifice.

“We come here today first and foremost to say to our troops how proud we are of them, how grateful we are for their service to the country and how much we support them, even as they carry out a difficult task and a difficult policy,” he said.”No matter what we think of the war, we support the troops.”

The Democratic nominee for president set out every day this week to talk about a peacetime economy and ended up discussing war. He was nudged in the new direction by a week’s barrage of bad news -- of heavy gunfire between U.S. troops and Iraqi gunmen, of mounting casualties and strengthening anti-American forces.

Kerry was asked by a voter Thursday about the public testimony of national security advisor Condoleezza Rice, who spoke before the commission investigating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. He said it would be wrong to comment on Rice and the commission before all testimony was completed. But he also said it would be wrong not to comment on Iraq.

“Before we talk about what I came here originally to talk about in terms of the economy -- and I’m going to get there -- I want to say a few words about events that are critical to all of us,” he began.

Just what to say and how to say it has been on the combat veteran’s mind for some time, as the rising death toll in Iraq has poked its way through a campaign whose theme was adorned by a banner here Thursday: “Fiscal Responsibility = A Stronger Economy.”

The Milwaukee campaign stop was emblematic of the difficulty facing Kerry as he tiptoed through war’s figurative minefields. The Democrat seemed to give two very separate short speeches during a single town hall event on Thursday.

The first took eight minutes and was about war. The second took 10 minutes and was about money. They were stitched together by a tortured transition -- praise for democracy, a slap at President Bush -- and were followed by a clutch of questions equally divided between tanks and tax cuts.

The first mini-speech, Kerry’s treatise on combat, seemed to resonate more deeply with the audience than his later promises to put America back to work. Filled with arguments about why he thinks America cannot continue to occupy a Middle Eastern country without more help, it was punctuated by warm applause.

Kerry charged that it was the president’s job to maximize the nation’s ability to be successful in battle and minimize the cost both in money and lives. He asked why America was “almost alone” in bearing the burden of the Iraqi conflict and pointed out that no Arab or European country “is made safer by a failed Iraq.”

He noted that he gave not one but two speeches in 2003 explaining what America could do to be successful in Iraq. And he posed a question to the several hundred listeners:

“If you were to ask any student in college, first year in foreign policy, ‘Do you think it’s a good idea for the United States of America to occupy a country alone, to occupy a Middle Eastern nation?’ what do you think the answer would be?” Kerry asked.

“No!” the audience bellowed.

“That’s precisely what we’re doing,” Kerry said. “We should be engaged in the diplomacy that is prepared to share -- with all those other countries that we need to [have] come to the table -- the decision-making and the responsibility.”

Then he struggled out of his navy blue blazer and launched into the remarks he really wanted to give, about how he wants to “harness the creative energy of this country,” about tax cuts and fairness and closing loopholes on U.S. corporations.

When Kerry finished speaking and it was the audience’s turn, the biggest question asked of the candidate came from one of the littlest members of the YMCA audience, an 11-year-old whose mind was on Iraq:

“How are you going to make strategies so you can lead your nation, lead your people to victory?” the boy asked.

The boy, Kerry answered, is “going to be my secretary of Defense.”