The Bully Pulpit Boxes Kerry

President Bush has gotten Senator Kerry to publicly state that he’d also have gone into Iraq, even knowing, as do today, that their capacity to produce WMDs was much more limited than we know now.

One of the commenters on the Brothers Judd Blog makes a great point: Kerry is now in a box. This is one opinion that he can’t flip-flop on, because if he does, President Bush can call him on it, via the Bully Pulpit–and the press, which has to cover the President of the United States, has to report it, no matter how much they loathe the man. And as Jim Geraghty wrote, “Somewhere, some Republican operative is emailing that statement to every anti-war voter he can find. Or perhaps the Nader campaign is.”

The chief reason that so many on the left would vote for Kerry–that he would have avoided Iraq, is now off the table. There’s still oodles of Bush hatred and who knows, that may be enough to win in November. But as Steven Den Beste predicted last month, the Republicans are quietly laying the groundwork to take many–perhaps all–of Kerry’s issues away from him.