Kerry's '350 Tax Increases'
By Michael Kinsley

Wednesday, March 24, 2004; Page A21

President Bush seems to be running his reelection campaign on the basis of the Powell doctrine: Go in with overwhelming force from the start and strike a blow from which the enemy can never recover. Like the United States in Iraq, the Bush campaign has superior firepower and far more money. The lesson of Vietnam, articulated by Colin Powell, is: Use your superiority -- don't fritter it away in gradual escalation.

One of the weapons in Bush's arsenal is an old family heirloom. Bush fired it himself during his big Florida rally over the weekend. He asserted that John Kerry had voted for higher taxes 350 times during his 20 years in the Senate. Vice President Cheney and other presidential surrogates have been using this statistoid for several weeks, and it has been picked up and repeated in the conservative media echo chamber. In 1992, Bush's father charged that Bill Clinton, as governor of Arkansas, had raised taxes 128 times. This shabby and deeply disingenuous allegation became an embarrassment to the elder Bush, but it took weeks and months of pounding by the media and the opposition to make it this way. I'm hoping to spare us all that with a Powell doctrine-like strike early on.

The purpose of a phony statistic such as this one isn't to convince people of its own accuracy. The purpose is to trap your opponent in a discussion he doesn't want to have (in this case about his past votes on taxes), bog down the discussion in silly details that few people will follow, and leave a general impression that where there's smoke there must be fire. And certainly, if what matters to you above all else is paying fewer taxes, you'd be a fool to choose Kerry over Bush. But this isn't about taxes; it's about honesty. Honesty means more than factual accuracy, It means avoiding disingenuousness: not talking rot when you know it's rot. If that matters to you above all, you may be out of luck with either candidate this election. But if you wish to measure comparative rot, this 350-tax-increases business may be hard for Kerry to top. [P6: emphasis added]