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Politics : Don't Blame Me, I Voted For Kerry -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: American Spirit who wrote (9258)	3/21/2004 1:15:16 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 81568

Springtime for John Kerry nytimes.com Lead Editorial The New York Times Published: March 21, 2004 These days, everybody knows that a presidential campaign has to have a rapid-response machine. Rising above opposition attacks is so . . . Dukakis. And everybody also agrees that you have to start hitting hard early. In 1996, President Bill Clinton caught the Republicans off guard by saturating swing states with aggressive TV ads long before Bob Dole was ready to make a move. The next generation of political consultants learned a lesson, and now, viewers with the bad luck to live in swing states are being barraged with both attacks and counterattacks while the snow is still falling. There's something deeply disconcerting about greeting the first day of spring with a presidential race already in full bloom. This year's conventional wisdom also holds that the next three months will be all about defining John Kerry. George W. Bush plans an all-out assault aimed at convincing the public that Mr. Kerry is a wishy-washy ditherer who is ill-equipped to be a wartime president. If that's what they think going into summer vacation, the White House believes, that's what they'll believe on Nov. 2. Mr. Bush, who was a kinder, gentler Republican in 2000, is opting for the meaner, tougher version this time around. It's very unusual for a sitting president to be on the attack so soon. He has every right to give this strategy a try, but he should remember that his strong suit with swing voters has always been his likability, not his policies. Mr. Kerry had a good run through the primaries, a streak that seemed to peak on the golden day that his clever staff discovered Mr. Bush's pick for the symbolic post of czar for job-saving was a businessman who was building a new factory in China. More recently, things have gone off course for the Kerry campaign, which is under pressure to accomplish a set of contradictory tasks. It's not easy to set a positive, optimistic tone while simultaneously trying to convince the nation to fire George W. Bush for being a deceitful politician who doesn't care about average citizens. We'd like to see Mr. Kerry veer more toward his own plans than Mr. Bush's failures. He needs to provide an alternate script to Mr. Bush's presidency — to explain very specifically what the Bush administration has done that he would do differently. And we'd like him to do it as forthrightly as possible. There was never any doubt that there would be compromises in a presidential campaign, but Mr. Kerry has seemed dishearteningly eager to embrace them. The public needs to see him make the hard choice at least once in a while. Thanks to the ridiculously early schedule of primaries, it's certainly true that by the time Mr. Kerry is formally designated the Democratic nominee in July, he will be a very, very familiar face. In fact, by the time people get back from their August vacations, the fall campaign may seem like an entirely different event — a rematch between old rivals who have been carping about each other since prep school.