Why John Kerry's acceptance speech could cost him the election.
opinionjournal.com
The Patriot Act
BY PAUL A. GIGOT
Monday, August 2, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT
BOSTON--The Democrats put on an impressive show here last week, wrapping their candidate in red, white and khaki. Walking around the FleetCenter, I couldn't find a single Democrat, whether delegate or journalist, who didn't think John Kerry had wrapped up the election with his revival of "liberal patriotism." And maybe they're right. But if things look different after Nov. 2, the seeds of defeat will have been sown on Thursday night, with the Kerry speech that went on forever but said too little.
Not that I don't appreciate Mr. Kerry's strategy. Like the other Democrats here, he and his strategists believe they've all but won. They think the voters have already decided to fire President Bush, so Democrats didn't need to make the case themselves. Their task was merely to present Mr. Kerry as a safe alternative. Then come November, as in 1980 and 1992, the undecided will break largely for the challenger and Mr. Kerry will realize his lifelong ambition.
So they staged a convention that was all biography and flags. Don't propose a new idea because it might create a political target. Make the campaign instead about Mr. Kerry's life, or at least that part of it before 1984 when he entered the Senate. And sound very tough on terrorism. On the latter point, I had to rub my eyes sometimes to make sure these were Democrats. Some of the rhetoric was so hawkish I half expected Donald Rumsfeld to show up. "You cannot run. You cannot hide. And we will destroy you," said John Edwards about "al Qaeda and the rest of these terrorists."
Whatever happened to all that shouting over the last year about Iraq? What about the reckless folly of pre-emption, the "illegality" of the war because we haven't found WMD, and the necessity of U.N. approval? Last week all that vanished. Joe Wilson and Paul Krugman were kept in undisclosed locations, while someone must have slipped Howard Dean a Prozac.
In his speech and the party platform, Mr. Kerry's disagreements with Mr. Bush on Iraq were distilled to two: He'll never "mislead" the country into war, and he'll persuade (somehow, but don't ask for details) more of the world to "share the burden." The Democrat said "I know what I have to do in Iraq" without saying what else he'd do differently than Mr. Bush. A Rip Van Winkle who returned last week after a year away would have concluded that the great Iraq debate was over, and the neocons had won.
Yet the very vagueness of Mr. Kerry's promises is what gives the Bush campaign a chance to counterattack. Especially if you re-read his Thursday speech, it is not nearly as muscular as it tried to sound. Its hawkishness was mostly personal, more or less stopping in 1970 in the Mekong Delta. My guess is that this is all by design, since the last thing Mr. Kerry wants is a debate about his own antiterror policies. He wants to compare medals, not philosophies.
The challenge for the Bush campaign is therefore to force a genuine and more specific debate about national security. That means, for starters, getting beyond Vietnam once and for all. Some conservatives think they can still score points by talking about Mr. Kerry's antiwar record after Vietnam, but this is a losing hand. Winning three purple hearts trumps tossing ribbons over a fence. In the autumn debates, Mr. Bush could learn from Bill Clinton's treatment of Bob Dole and George H.W. Bush and praise Mr. Kerry's Vietnam service, before pivoting to say the real issue is what he would do as president.
And it is here where Mr. Kerry's Senate record becomes important. Most politicians want voters to forget what they did as younger men. The 60-year-old Mr. Kerry wants voters to forget what he did after he turned 40. "I ask you to judge me by my record," Mr. Kerry said on Thursday--and then promptly said almost nothing else about it. "Something tells me you'll see that line in a TV ad somewhere," says one Bush strategist. And rightly so. Nineteen years in the Senate are surely a better guide to presidential behavior than four months in Vietnam.
To make this point, however, Mr. Bush will have to do better than his weekend rhetoric that Mr. Kerry "has thousands of votes" in the Senate "but few signature achievements." Mr. Kerry isn't running for the Senate anymore, he's running for the White House. And if he did nothing in the Senate, then by definition he did nothing for voters to worry about. The better argument is that Mr. Kerry's votes were consistently dovish and wrong and are thus a harbinger of weakness if elected. While he now praises Ronald Reagan, in the 1980s Mr. Kerry fought every one of the Gipper's successful policies.
Mr. Kerry's speech provided new targets too. His main vow was that "I will bring back this nation's time-honored tradition: the United States of America never goes to war because we want to, we only go to war because we have to." This would have ruled out Kosovo, Bosnia and Haiti--three military actions the Senator endorsed. Not to mention World War I and Korea. This is a repudiation of pre-emption, but worse it sounds like a return to the pre-9/11 policy of waiting until terrorists hit us, rather than taking the war to the terrorists on their turf. This is a debate Mr. Bush should also want to have.
How odd, too, that in 46 minutes Mr. Kerry couldn't manage a single line lauding U.S. forces for liberating Afghanistan and Iraq. He devoted paragraphs to praising his comrades from Vietnam (and thus himself), but he couldn't acknowledge just once that our current military sacrifices are for a just cause. I suspect this also reflects his desire to avoid arguing over Iraq, on which he has been so consistently inconsistent.
The speech "gives us a chance to have a debate with him over Iraq, because he has an unsustainable position," says a senior Bush strategist. Mr. Kerry wants to criticize the war but won't say if he regrets his original vote for it. "Over the next 90 days, he's going to be forced to say, 'I agree that we should have gone to war,' or not."
The irony in all of this is that it is Mr. Kerry who claims to be a man who sees "complexities." But from here to November he wants to avoid any debate over specific security cases. To quote another Democratic nominee from Massachusetts, he wants the election to be about "competence, not ideology." And that candidate also had a lead in July 1988.
Unlike Michael Dukakis, however, Mr. Kerry isn't about to defeat himself, and he has built what he hopes will be a political Kevlar vest called patriotism. For Mr. Bush to win, he now has to convince voters that there is more to his own record--and much more to fighting terrorism--than waving the flag.
Mr. Gigot is the Journal's editorial page editor. |
