EDITORIALS; Fooling No One.(John F. Kerry)

"Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.) has begun targeting swing voters and disaffected Republicans in an effort to expand the election battleground, a strategy that includes emphasizing centrist themes on the campaign trail while privately reassuring liberal constituencies he is committed to their core issues."

Washington Post, May 23

Pick your metaphor: brain freeze; foot in mouth disease; failing to engage the brain before putting mouth into gear, etc., etc. Nary a week goes by that presumptive Democratic Presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry doesn't say something so addlepated that it mystifies even his most loyal supporters.

I didn't really think all that much about Kerry's flip-flop-flip on abortion and Supreme Court nominees until I read the opening paragraph from a story that appeared in the Washington Post.

What are Post writers Jim VandeHei and Dan Balz saying? Pretty much what President Bush has been saying all along about Kerry. The junior senator will say anything in a oafish effort to find voters. This includes, but is not limited to, abandoning supposedly carved-in-stone positions, and then denying he has done anything of the sort when he somersaults back to his original position.

Please understand that no one on the face of the earth really believes that there are any conditions under which Kerry would nominate to the Supreme Court a justice who'd not pledged allegiance to Roe v. Wade. Kerry not only has promised as much on numerous occasions, last year he also told a meeting of Democratic Party leaders, "I am prepared to filibuster, if necessary, any Supreme Court nominee who would turn back the clock on a woman's right to choose or the constitutional right to privacy....The test is basic - - any person who thinks it's his or her job to push an extreme political agenda rather than to interpret the law should not be a Supreme Court justice."

Yet Kerry set off a mid-size storm when he told Ron Fournier of the Associated Press that he might, just might, nominate an anti-Roe justice, were he to become President. (The headline to the story was, "Kerry Open to Anti-Abortion Judges.")