Speak The Truth
David Corn, Washington editor of The Nation, is the author of The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception (Crown Publishers).
There were no weapons of mass destruction. There was no operational link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. There was no direct and immediate threat. There was no solid planning for the post-invasion period. The evidence to date indicates that George W. Bush was wrong on key pillars of his Iraq policy. Yet if being ahead in the polls means anything, he has not had to pay a political price for his errors, false assertions and missteps"unless that price is a single-digit lead over John Kerry that, sans Iraq, might have been a double-digit lead. After taking various hits"mounting casualties and continued instability in Iraq, the Clarke book, the Woodward book"Bush appears to have maintained his stride. (Fifty million dollars’ worth of ads helped.)
At the same time, Kerry seems off balance. He has tripped over the small stuff: saying he did not own an SUV when it turns out that his family does, engaging in unnecessary back and forth regarding the release of his military records, explaining yet again whether he threw his ribbon or medals away during a Vietnam war protest. These petty episodes, rightly or not, do make him look like a same-old pol. And he has muffed the big stuff: cutting back on earlier promises to increase social spending, overemphasizing deficit-reduction (an important issue but one that rarely moves voters), relying on consultants who openly discuss with reporters their goal of repositioning Kerry as a so-called centrist, and not yet articulating a detailed strategy for Iraq. To use a somewhat subjective measurement, he has not been a kick-ass candidate.
To be fair, there may not be much Kerry can do about the war. He is boxed in. He had a nuanced position before the war: he was for giving Bush a blank check but against the way Bush cashed it. Now he’s for sticking it out"or, as Bush would say, staying the course"but with more international input. Yet, as Kerry notes, Bush has moved closer to the Kerry position by allowing the UN to design the next government of Iraq. So when it comes to the ground game in Iraq, what would Kerry do fundamentally different?
Walter Russell Mead, a scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations, recently summed up this Bush-Kerry comparison in terms not encouraging for the Kerry camp: "The nightmare for Kerry is that all of his criticisms become moot, except the would-shoulda-coulda criticism about the war. In this sense, voters are going to say to themselves: ‘What’s the difference? If I vote for Kerry, I will get a war in Iraq and someone who doesn’t believe in the war but is going to have to fight it anyway. If I vote for Bush, I get a war in Iraq, fought by someone who believes in the war."
Kerry can try to sell himself as a man of sounder judgment than the current commander-in-chief. But it is hard for a candidate to out-commander the commander, especially when the commander is out there commanding. (Ronald Reagan managed to do so in 1980 against President Jimmy Carter, but Carter, besieged by the Iranian hostage crisis and a disastrous economy, was hardly the embodiment of Alpha-male leadership.) No wonder White House spinners are touting Bob Woodward’s Plan of Attack. Bush comes across in the book as a fellow who cannot see beyond his own biases, who is constitutionally incapable of policy reflection. But he sure is decisive.
If Kerry cannot beat Bush on Iraq, that leaves him with one other option: mounting a kick-ass campaign. I’ve given up writing how-to columns for candidates. The candidates rarely (read: never) listen. After all, they’re already surrounded by aides, consultants, friends and relatives telling them what to do. Some of these folks even know what they’re talking about. And too often pundit advice to a candidate essentially says be the person you are not. That is usually a hard trick for anyone to pull off.
None of this is to say that Kerry supporters (or citizens yearning to see Bush sent packing) should abandon all hope. Kerry certainly can do better as a campaigner"without having to undergo a personality transplant. He was, once upon a time, a charismatic and vigorous leader: when he was a captain of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. His 1971 appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has a hallowed place in the Kerry tale. That was when he eloquently declared, "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" But his entire testimony was a bravura performance. Conservative detractors have focused on his anguished remarks regarding reports of war crimes committed by U.S. troops, and Kerry has tried to distance himself from these comments. But his testimony showed an ardent devotion to his brothers-in-arms and a willingness to speak freely. An example:
"Where are the leaders of our country?... Where are McNamara, Rostow, Bundy, Gilpatric and so many others? Where are they now that we, the men whom they sent off to war, have returned? These are commanders who have deserted their troops, and there is no more serious crime in the law of war. The Army says they never leave their wounded. The Marines say they never leave even their dead. These men have left all the casualties and retreated behind a pious shield of public rectitude. They have left the real stuff of their reputations bleaching behind them in the sun."
When asked about the My Lai massacre, in which U.S. troops slaughtered Vietnamese civilians, he said,
"I think that in this question you have to separate guilt from responsibility, and I think clearly the responsibility for what has happened there lies elsewhere [beyond Lieut. William Calley, who was in charge of the U.S. troops at My Lai]. I think it lies with the men who designed free-fire zones. I think it lies with the men who encouraged body counts. I think it lies in large part with this country, which allows a young child before he reaches the age of 14 to see 12,5000 deaths on television, which glorifies the John Wayne syndrome, which puts out fighting man comic books on the stands, which allows us in training to do calisthenics to four counts, on the fourth count of which we stand up and shout ‘kill’ in unison, which has posters in barracks in this country with a crucified Vietnamese, blood on him, and underneath it says, ‘kill the gook.’"
Kerry’s critique went beyond the war. He noted that big-money politics corrupted the public interest: "To run for representative in any populated area costs about $50,000. Many people simply don’t have that available, and in order to get it inevitably wind up with their hands tied." And he criticized his hosts:
"I have seen an unwillingness on the part of too many of the members of this body to respond, to take gutsy stands, to face questions other than their own re-election, to make a profile of courage... Unless we can respond on as great a question as the war, I seriously question how we are going to find the kind of response needed to meet questions such as poverty, and hunger and questions such as birth control and so many of the things that face our society today from low-income housing to schooling."
Now that was 33 years ago, and the years change most of us. What would Lieut. Kerry say to Sen. Kerry about his current level of gutsiness? Kerry has held tight to many of his core views over the decades: environmental protection, abortion rights, boosting the minimum wage, campaign finance reform. But has the passion dripped out of him? Or is he, after 19 years in the buttoned-down Senate, merely no longer able to convey it effectively? In trying to bash Bush recently for high oil prices, Kerry said, "We need to try to work towards a uniformity because those different standards raise the prices very significantly of what happens in distribution nationally." Talk about not finding a voice. And more than one Democrat in Washington, worried about Kerry’s performance as a candidate, has asked, "Is he our Bob Dole?" Moreover, with the Bush campaign viciously assailing Kerry for being an unwavering liberal and a constant, finger-in-the-wind flip-flopper, polls show that more people think Bush is more likely to adhere to his beliefs than Kerry is. What a victory for the Bush camp.
Kerry should get in touch with his inner angry-but-hopeful-young-man. (Whoops, that could be construed as advice for the candidate.) Not that he should be denouncing The Man and raging against the machine. But if he cannot offer a clear alternative to Bush’s Iraq mess, he has to find other ways to demonstrate strength, judgment and conviction. Sure, that’s tough to do when the Bush campaign is dropping a piano on you everyday. It’s also hard to do when you are busy repositioning yourself per your consultant’s recommendations. The incessant harking back to Vietnam war-hero glory (and gory) days will only get Kerry so far. It is as important"if not more so"for Kerry to display a modern-day version of the passion, idealism and sense of commitment that defined his opposition to the war. John Kerry once spoke from his gut (without the help of Bob Shrum and other consultants). He connected. He must do so again.
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Published: Apr 27 2004
