Joseph Knippenberg makes a very good point in the Marietta Daily Journal (Georgia) about the dilemna and the opportunity the Demos face, and not only during the convention. The bitter partisan accusations that Bush is a liar by folks like Cleland, and the more moderated tone of the Demo platform, may allow the Kerry campaign to have it both ways; at least they’re try it, although probably less during th convention than during the campaign.

His op-ed is entitled, "Max Cleland, meet Michael Moore." He begins: "A few days ago, the Kerry campaign trotted out its national co-chair, former Georgia Senator Max Cleland, to repeat a bunch of canards regarding President George W. Bush’s case for going to war with Iraq. The president, Cleland said, ’flat-out lied’ to Congress regarding Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction, its nuclear weapons program, its attempts to purchase yellowcake uranium in Africa and its ties to al-Qaida. Bush’s real motive for going to war was that ’he concluded that his daddy was a failed president and one of the ways he failed was that he did not take out Saddam Hussein.’ ’So,’ Cleland concluded, Bush 43 had to be ’Mr. Macho Man.’

"Unfortunately, the record painstakingly assembled by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and by its British counterpart doesn’t support ex-Sen. Cleland’s charges. The intelligence community may have overstated the evidence it had for Saddam’s WMD, but the Bush Administration did not misrepresent the consensus, not only of the U.S. experts but of their colleagues abroad. As Prime Minister Tony Blair said in response to the British Butler report, ’the issue of good faith should now be at an end.’" Read it all.