Site Presented By
Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Taranto, Kristol and others trash Kerry for "flip-flopping" over Iraq. Plus: Limbaugh and Savage mock Clinton's heart surgery.
Sep 9, 2004 | The war in Iraq is no doubt a critical issue for the presidential campaign and beyond, but election watchers on both sides of the race contend that it's still difficult to pin down just what John Kerry plans to do about U.S. military operations and the greater struggle to bring stability to the war-torn nation. A number of Democrats have expressed concern that Kerry's message on Iraq remains unclear. While his consistent attacks on Bush's misleading case for war and blatantly ill-planned occupation may be well-founded, they've also been essentially backward looking.
As Kerry continued to condemn Bush's Iraq policy this week, calling it "the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time" and reiterating that he would never go to war "without a plan to win the peace," conservative commentators played up Kerry's seemingly elusive position on what the United States should do next. Several columnists and bloggers highlighted an article published on Monday by ABC News columnist Teddy Davis:
"There is no way to know where Kerry will ultimately end up on Iraq. For now, his plan over the next 56 days is to focus on the economy.
"But even if that strategy worked in 1992, Labor Day demonstrated that even when Kerry comes out swinging on domestic policy, he is going to be asked about Iraq.
"As Kerry said to the Democratic Leadership Council in New York on June 29, 2002, when he was trying to distinguish himself in the early field of presidential contenders, 'The Presidency has three key job descriptions: chief executive of the fiscal and domestic policies of the United States -- head of state and therefore the nation's chief diplomat -- and Commander in Chief of the Nation's military forces. We dare not avoid discussing two-thirds of the job.'"
UCLA law professor and blogger Eugene Volokh (The Volokh Conspiracy) says that the lack of a clear position on the future of Iraq will doom Kerry.
"If Davis is right -- and his column seems to support that position -- and if enough of the public ends up having that perception, that can't possibly be good for Kerry."
Opinion Journal editor James Taranto casts a jaded eye on the recent spate of advice from high-profile Dems that Kerry focus on domestic issues down the home stretch.
"Ignore national security, avoid Vietnam, concentrate on domestic issues -- well, it did work for Clinton. But a 1992 strategy makes no sense in 2004. There are many differences between the two elections, but the most salient is that today we are at war. A candidate who has nothing to say about national security cannot expect to win the White House during wartime."
But if Taranto goes out on a limb with Kerry having "nothing to say" about national security, it snaps off under him when he anoints filmmaker Michael Moore a Kerry foreign policy advisor and wonders if the senior Dems' advice isn't really just euthanasia for the campaign.
"In his Rocky Horror speech last Thursday night [a reference to Kerry's midnight campaign appearance in Ohio directly following Bush's convention speech], Kerry presented himself to the nation as a bitter weakling who can't abide criticism and who takes his foreign-policy cues from Michael Moore. That is political poison. Could it be that [chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council Sen. Evan] Bayh and Clinton have written off Kerry's chances of winning the presidency and are urging him instead to follow a path that will allow him to lose with dignity, so as to minimize their party's down-ballot losses?"
Other right-wingers are running with the "flip-flop" theme flogged by the Bush campaign. Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol has his own twist on what Kerry is saying about Bush's war policy:
"John Kerry said that Iraq was 'the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time.' Translation: We would be better off if Saddam Hussein were still in power."
While Kristol himself has been sharply critical of Bush's Iraq policy -- last April he wrote, "It is clear that there have been failures in planning and in execution, failures that have been evident for most of the last year" -- he pegs his criticism solely to the notion that Kerry can't make up his mind whether leaving Saddam in power was a good idea or not.
A policy of containment was "not an unheard of point of view," writes Kristol. "Indeed, as President Bush pointed out today, it was Howard Dean's position during the primary season. On December 15, 2003, in a speech at the Pacific Council on International Policy in Los Angeles, Dean said that 'the capture of Saddam Hussein has not made America safer.' Dean also said, 'The difficulties and tragedies we have faced in Iraq show the administration launched the war in the wrong way, at the wrong time, with inadequate planning, insufficient help, and at the extraordinary cost, so far, of $166 billion.'
"But who challenged Dean immediately? John Kerry. On December 16, at Drake University in Iowa, Kerry asserted that 'those who doubted whether Iraq or the world would be better off without Saddam Hussein, and those who believe today that we are not safer with his capture, don't have the judgment to be president or the credibility to be elected president.'
"Kerry was right then."
