Kerry's Wild Years

An old interview with the Harvard Crimson has provided another opportunity for conservatives to discuss Kerry's "radical" past. This seems pretty overblown to me, nothing he says in the interview is all that radical. It isn't like he was advocating the violent overthrow of the government or anything. He does come out in favor of a negative income tax, full employment through "economic controls" and reductions in defense spending, which were certainly "leftist" posistions, but still within the mainstream of American politics. After all, Nixon proposed something along the lines of a negative income tax with his Family Assitance Plan, Nixon also instituted wage and price controls to keep unemployment low for the 1972 election and defense spending did in fact fall after Vietnam. More importantly, Kerry was quite young when the Crimson article was written and it doesn't seem all that reasonable to expect someone to hold exactly the same or even similar views over several decades. His posistions as a Senator seem fair game, but jumping all over John Kerry for things he said in 1970 is ridiculous.