His handlers didn't trust him to deliver the statement accurately at a presser.
I've seen a version of the speechwriters' script for the 'joke'. Delivered correctly it would have been clear he was asserting that President Bush hadn't studied or 'done his homework' on Iraq before starting the military campaign (I forget the exact wording, but it's easy enough to make up a statement not unlike Kerry's that makes it clear).
Since he couldn't get a throw away line right, came off as even stupider (to any of us who remember his 1971 behavior) in his presser yesterday, they decided it had to be written.
(And even there he came off as stupid, any 'troop'--you can't back-construct the singular to mean a person, a troop is a group of soldiers (or Marines), and the collective applies to individuals because it applies to the groups.
To say nothing of the redunancy of '. . .misinterpreted to wrongly. . .')
Thanks, I wondered about that. It certainly looked strange to my eyes but I thought it could be an American way of using the word "troops". apparently not so.
So the well educated Senator Kerry has produced one statement that I and many others were convinced was straight out of ScrappleFace and a second statement using ungrammatical language.
Stuck on stupid was it?