Bad News for Kerry
By George F. Will
Thursday, September 9, 2004; Page A27
".....Kerry is the candidate of the intellectually vain -- of those who, practicing the politics of condescension, consider Bush moronic. But Kerry is unwilling to engage Bush's idea.
Hence he is allowing Bush to have what he wants, a one-issue election. The issue is a conflation of the wars in Iraq and on terrorism in the single subject "security." Kerry is trying, and failing, to pry apart judgments about the two. But even if he succeeds, he continues to deepen the risible incoherence of his still-multiplying positions on Iraq.
In his speech last week to the American Legion convention, Kerry said that in Iraq he, as president, would have done "almost everything differently." The indisputable implication is that if he had been president since 2001, America would be in Iraq.
But when pandering to Iowa's Democratic activists last winter, Kerry placed himself among the "antiwar candidates." More recently he has said that even knowing what we do about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, he would still have voted to authorize force. But on Monday he said Iraq was "the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time." He has said that "it would be unwise beyond belief" for America "to leave a failed Iraq in its wake" -- and that too few U.S. troops are there. But he has also said that he will bring some of them home -- "where they belong" -- in his first term. Then he said in his first year. Then in his first six months.
The New Republic, which supports him, says his position, which had been "inscrutable," is now "indefensible....."
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