Kerry caught in damage-control lie.

How is John Kerry's office like a subway? A: You have to put in coins to open gates! Newsweek's Isikoff catches the Democratic frontrunner in a damage control lie about not meeting notorious campaign contributior Johnny Chung (remember him?) weeks before Chung funneled him thousands of dollars in illegal campaign contributions. Kerry's office even acted to open doors for Chung at the SEC--something Kerry later told the Boston Herald was "totally coincidental." ...

According to Isikoff, who got hold of a handwritten note Kerry wrote Chung mentioning the prefundraiser meeting,

A Kerry spokesman acknowledged that the senator may have met with Chung prior to the fund-raiser, but not in his Senate office. [Emphasis added.]

Well all right then! But of course Kerry had denied meeting with Chung at all prior to the fundraiser. In January, 1998, the Boston Herald reported:

"The first time I met him [Chung] was there [at the Beverly Hill fund-raiser]," Kerry said.

Bonus tidbit: Kerry had apparently called the Herald, rather than vice-versa, to impart this bit of disinformation ... If Howard Dean can't mount an anti-Washington attack based on this sort of cash-for-access game, he needs another new campaign manager. ... 

More Kerry Kabuki:  Isikoff also notes that while Kerry ostentatiously refuses PAC money, he conveniently and quietly broke his pledge to limit far larger soft money contributions:

Though he has shunned PAC donations, which are limited to $5,000 apiece, the senator in 2001 formed a fund-raising group called the Citizen Soldier Fund, which brought in more than $1.2 million in unregulated "soft money." Kerry pledged he would limit individual donations to $10,000. But in late 2002, just before new federal laws banning soft money took effect, Kerry quietly lifted the ceiling and took all the cash he could get. In the month before the election, the fund raised nearly $879,000—including $27,500 from wireless telecom firms such as T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon. That same month, Kerry cosponsored a bill to overturn a judge's ruling and permit the wireless firms to bid on billions of dollars' worth of wireless airwaves. Kerry aide Cutter says it's a "stretch" to draw any connection between the two events. [Emphasis added]

This incident--featuring a moralistic Kerry pledge that's only a pledge until he needs to break it--will be familiar to supporters of former Massachusetts governor William Weld, who struck a historic goo-goo pact with Kerry limiting the personal funds each candidate could put into their 1996 Senate race, only to see Kerry break it  at the end of the campaign when he needed money. ...

P.S.: Patti Davis to the contrary notwithstanding, the Kerry botox story is not a frivolous bit of gossip but a perfectly legitimate synecdoche for this type of Kerry behavior. There is a phony, clean facade, and the reality behind the phony facade. ...