There comes a moment in every political campaign when the challenger moves beyond counterpunching and starts looking presidential that is, plausible as a policymaker and not just a critic. That moment is coming around for John Kerry.
You can forgive Kerry for having skimped somewhat up to this point when it comes to accentuating the positive. Bush has done a dandy job of undermining Bush, so why waste ammunition when your opponent is already shooting himself in the foot? The catastrophe of the Iraq occupation is everyday news, in flames; the New York Times has had to confess it was snookered before the war on WMD; even Secretary of State Powell scrambled backwards to blast the intelligence services that, he says, misled him into misleading America before the Security Council; Ahmed Chalabi, Americas numberone friend in Iraq, is accused of telling Iranian intelligence that the US had cracked their code; American soldiers are dying in Afghanistan toward no evident end; alQaida and friends are alive and plotting and so it goes. No less an expert than Bill Clinton is said to have lauded Kerrys reticence.
So when it comes to the pragmatics of foreign policy in a campaign, Kerry may well have been thinking that he had more to lose if he said too much, risking offense to either Deaniacs or Realists among his constituents. So he borrowed a slogan from Mies van der Rohe: Less Is More.
But in recent weeks, Washington Democrats have been knocking the presumptive candidate for failing to come across with an extensive statement of international purpose, especially on Iraq though why they think he needs to do everything at once, with five months still remaining before the moment of truth, is unclear. Anxiety, perhaps, breeds urgency.
So Kerry has started giving big speeches on national security, carving out positions and hoping to eke out some soundbite space in the electronic ether. On 27 May, he launched a series of foreign policy speeches in Seattle. On 1 June, he spoke at length on nuclear security in Florida. Listen to these speeches online and its hard to hear him as the tedious klutz the pundits are grumpy about.
Bushs White House, Kerry said in Seattle, has looked to force before exhausting diplomacy; they bullied when they should have persuaded. Theyve gone it alone when they should have assembled a whole team. They have hoped for the best when they should have prepared for the worst. Theyve made America less safe than we should be in a dangerous world. In short, they have undermined the legacy of generations of American leadership, and that is what we must restore, and that is what I will restore.
Shredding alliances is not the way to win the war on terror or even to make America safer, Kerry said. As president, my number one security goal will be to prevent the terrorists from gaining weapons of mass murder, and our overriding mission will be to disrupt and destroy their terrorist cells. Because al Qaida is a network with many branches, we have to take the fight to the enemy on every continent smartly. And we have to enlist other countries in that cause.
Where Bush sees one side to every question such is the depth of his unilateralism and flagrantly showed the world what he meant by preventive (mislabeled preemptive) war, Kerrys hallmark is multilateralism. For him, clearly, war is a last resort.
If a man continually blusters, if he lacks civility, a big stick will not save him from trouble, Kerry said, quoting Theodore Roosevelt, Mr. Big Stick Republican himself.
Kerry plumps for the UN and NATO. There was a time not so long ago when the might of our alliances was a driving force in the survival and the success of freedom in two world wars, in the long years of the Cold War, then from the Gulf War to Bosnia, to Kosovo, Kerry said. We extended a hand, not a fist.
He endorses military superiority, as Bush does, but says to the soldiers: You will never be sent into harms way without enough troops for the task or asked to fight a war without a plan to win the peace. And you will never be given assignments which have not been clearly defined and for which you are not professionally trained. This administration has discarded and disrespected the advice, wisdom and experience of our professional military officers, and often ended the careers of those who dared to give their honest assessments I will never let ideology trump the truth.
We must ensure that lawless states and terrorists will not be armed with weapons of mass destruction. This is the single gravest threat to our security.
Kerry is still stepping gingerly through the minefield of Iraq, but while he wasnt exactly detailed, he wasnt exactly reticent, either. There are questions he hasnt answered about the Arab world, about trade, about US bases and still, hes been more explicit about foreign policy than any other candidate within memory. And the night of his Seattle speech, what did Americas still dominant news channels convey of his 3500 words?
ABC: 28 words. NBC: 42 words. CBS: 43 words.
Oh, the networks paraphrased and summed up, all right. They relayed some Democratic grumbles about Kerrys flaws. So much for the candidates foreign policy views in his own words words delivered with reasonable animation, by the way, despite the lamentations of pundits like defrocked New York Times executive editor turned Guardian columnist Howell Raines.
No wonder the campaigns degenerate into barking sound bites. When theres no getting a paragraph in edgewise, commercials are the communiqués of choice. Thus is the corruption of politics, paid for by the hundreds of millions of dollars that must be raised to finance Bushs 30second lies and Kerrys 30second slogans.
The Bush people are said to be brimming with confidence. Theyre spending tens of millions of dollars pummeling Kerry, elevating his negatives. They take courage in the fact that, while Bush has sunk in the polls, Kerry hasnt risen. They think Kerry is too stolid to swing the swing states. Or at least this is what they say and what they have to believe.
