Kerry Claims Fatigue, 'Inarticulate Moment' Spawned Infamous Iraq Funding Comment

By Jimmy Moore
Talon News
September 30, 2004

Just one day before he meets President George W. Bush in the first debate between the two major presidential candidates before millions on national television, Democratic presidential nominee John F. Kerry said his infamous statement that he voted for the funding of the war in Iraq before he voted against it was an "inarticulate moment" because of campaign fatigue.

In an interview with ABC's Diane Sawyer on "Good Morning America" on Wednesday, Kerry said he originally supported the $87 million appropriations bill because it was going to be paid for by rolling back some of the tax cuts for the richest Americans.

However, the Massachusetts senator said he decided to vote against the bill to fund the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan as a "protest" over the way it was going to be paid for.

The Bush campaign has used this crucial vote from the Democratic presidential nominee to hammer the point that Kerry does not support the troops who are fighting on behalf of the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In fact, the Bush campaign has used the infamous Kerry quote in political ads, "I actually did vote for the $87-billion before I voted against it."

Kerry told Sawyer that he simply misspoke.

"It just was a very inarticulate way of saying something, and I had one of those inarticulate moments late in the evening when I was dead tired in the primaries and I didn't say something very clearly," Kerry admitted to Sawyer.

Yet the speech Kerry gave on March 16 at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia was held in the middle of the day at noon, not at a late night hour as he suggested in the interview with Sawyer.

Chad Clanton, a Kerry campaign spokesman, told CNSNews.com that the Democratic candidate "simply got the time of day wrong."

"Campaigns are long, grueling things," Clanton surmised to CNSNews.com. "It's like one continuous blur."

Kerry said although he initially supported authorizing the president to go to war with Iraq based on the information he was given, he said he would not have supported the war with Iraq as Bush did if he knew "there was no imminent threat to America, knowing there were no weapons of mass destruction, knowing there was no connection between 9/11 and Saddam Hussein."

The Bush campaign says this is yet another example of how Kerry has been indecisive and unclear about his position on the issues.

The Republican National Committee took this latest explanation of the comment from Kerry about his "inarticulate moment" and sent a message to supporters entitled "Perhaps His Watch Was On Paris Time?"

Bush and Kerry will discuss foreign policy in the first scheduled nationally televised debate Thursday night.