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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
As the war in Iraq spins out of control, why isn't John Kerry launching a frontal assault on Bush's failed policies?
Apr 9, 2004 | As the war in Iraq seemed to spiral out of control -- with more than 30 U.S. soldiers and hundreds of Iraqis killed since the weekend, with the charred corpses of American citizens hanging from a bridge in Fallujah and Iraqi kidnappers threatening to burn foreigners alive, with Shiite and Sunni uprisings making a mockery of Bush administration claims that Americans would be "greeted as liberators" -- Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry traveled to Washington Wednesday to deliver a major policy address at Georgetown University. His subject: the federal budget deficit.
The subject was much the same for the Kerry campaign all week. This was the week Kerry campaign planners penciled in budget talk, and they weren't about to let the war bump them off message. For much of the week, the only hint of Iraq on the Kerry campaign's home page was a small-type link to a speech Kerry gave in Iowa when Saddam Hussein was captured four months ago. On Thursday morning, the Web site featured a waving American flag and a milquetoast comment from Kerry minimizing his differences with the president and honoring the sacrifices of fallen soldiers.
And even when Iraq fit into Kerry's budget message, the Kerry camp steered clear of it. Explaining the absence of Iraq funding in a budget analysis the campaign released this week, Kerry surrogate Sen. Jon Corzine said: "We wanted to make sure this wasn't focused on the debate about whether we should or shouldn't support our troops."
Iraq is exploding in Bush's lap, but Kerry seems to be the one running scared. Although Kerry has made sporadic comments about Iraq throughout the week -- in a radio interview Wednesday, he called the war "one of the greatest failures of diplomacy and failures of judgment that I have seen in all the time that I've been in public life," and on Thursday he repeated his attack on Bush's unilateralist approach to the war -- he has not made the war a centerpiece of his campaign. As a young naval officer just back from Vietnam, John Kerry had the courage to help lead the nation out of one misguided military adventure; as a U.S. senator and presidential candidate, why is Kerry so cautious, so careful, so tentative now?
Maybe the Kerry campaign feels trapped by the senator's own record on Iraq; he voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq in October, then voted against $87.5 billion in funding for the war. Maybe the ghost of Howard Dean haunts the campaign. Maybe Kerry's advisors fear that Bush administration smears -- Kerry is an appeaser, Kerry will cut and run, Kerry won't support the troops -- might begin to stick. A spokesman for the Kerry campaign seemed to acknowledge as much Thursday, saying that the campaign did not want to expose itself to charges of politicizing the war.
Or maybe the Kerry campaign believes -- and not unreasonably -- that the war is going so badly now that there's no need to say much about it. Public support for Bush's handling of the war has dropped from 59 percent in January to 40 percent in a new Pew Center poll -- and that poll was released early this week, before the TV news brought home stories of substantial U.S. casualties in Iraq.
"I think Kerry's letting George Bush beat himself, just standing aside and letting events diminish Bush's leadership," says Jeffrey Berry, a political science professor at Tufts University who follows Massachusetts politics -- and, hence, Kerry -- closely. "That's part of a workable strategy, but there's another piece missing."
That other piece, Berry and other analysts say, is an affirmative case for Kerry. It is one thing to say that Bush has led us into a new Vietnam, as Sen. Edward Kennedy said earlier this week. It is quite another to explain how Kerry might lead us out of it.
Kerry must have known that he'd be pressed on the latter point as he made the radio and TV rounds promoting his budget policies this week. But when the question was put to him, Kerry appeared to be caught flat-footed. When asked Wednesday what he would be doing differently in Iraq, the challenger produced a stumbling non-sequitur of a response more typical of his opponent. "Right now," Kerry said, "what I would do differently is, I mean, look, I'm not the president, and I didn't create this mess, so I don't want to acknowledge a mistake I haven't made."
A Kerry spokesman told Salon on Thursday that it's incumbent on Bush -- not Kerry -- to address the crisis in Iraq. "What has the president said about this?" the Kerry spokesman asked. "He needs to explain what his policy is, what his plan is to address what's going on right now. But he's been down on his ranch in Crawford. The spotlight isn't on John Kerry. The spotlight needs to be on Bush. He's the president, and he's the person who has carved out these policies."
That's certainly true, but it's also true that Kerry wants to be elected president himself. To get there, he's going to have to offer a clear alternative to Bush. He did that this week on budget issues, but he has had much greater difficulty when it comes to the war on Iraq.
