The Discerning Texan
All that is necessary for evil to triumph, is for good men to do nothing.
-- Edmund Burke
-- Edmund Burke
Friday, September 24, 2004
Kerry's left turn on Iraq: a losing proposition
Former Clinton advisor Dick Morris correctly argues that Kerry's decision to placate his hard left Democratic base by going firmly anti-war (for today, anyway...) will cost him in the center and with Reagan Democrats.
But even more telling is Mark Steyn's latest piece in the UK Spectator. Some highlights (read the whole thing here):
Kerry has spent two months doing everything wrong, beginning with his choice of running mate. His Vietnam nostalgia-night ‘reporting for duty’ convention speech was described by yours truly in the Telegraph as ‘verbose, shapeless, platitudinous, complacent, ill-disciplined, arrogant and humourless’. But most observers seemed to think it was a stroke of genius, and attributed the unprecedented lack of a post-convention poll bounce to the fact that Kerry was so good and so ahead of the game he’d gotten his post-convention bounce before the convention. This is an example of a phenomenon I’ve noted for a couple of years: the principal effect of America’s so-called ‘liberal media bias’ is that the Democratic party and the pro-Democrat press sustain each other’s delusions.
It happened again a week after the convention. The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth began their anti-Kerry campaign. The senator’s people assured the media that the charges were all false, the media assured the senator’s people that nobody in the press was going to go near the story. Partly as a result of this insulation from reality, by the end of August the underfunded veterans had driven Kerry’s numbers down, extracted crucial retractions of many of his most celebrated war stories, and forced the candidate into hiding, unable to risk giving an interview even to sympathetic TV softballers.
Desperate for payback for his month of SwiftVet hell, the thin-skinned Kerry demanded that his campaign went on the attack about Bush’s fitful National Guard service back in the Vietnam era. Nobody cares. But Dan Rather and CBS did a big story on whether Bush failed to show up for a physical in the War of 1812, and the Kerry campaign promptly lost most of September because Dan’s case had been built on laughably fake memos supplied as part of a convoluted deal involving the network, a man of dubious mental stability and key Kerry campaign contacts including Joe Lockhart, the former Clinton press secretary who was brought on board to get Kerry out of last month’s mess, not land him in this month’s.
[...] There is an attack dog on the Kerry team. Unfortunately, it’s his wife, and folks don’t like that in a prospective First Lady. Teresa Heinz Kerry dismisses her husband’s critics as ‘idiots’ and ‘scumbags’, and Kerry’s new advisers seem eager to limit her visibility. I’ve lost count of the number of Democrat women who’ve said to me that they can’t stand her.
So that was the state of play in mid-September: a candidate in hiding, a lightweight running-mate way out of his league, and a motor-mouth wife duct-taped and tossed into the cellar.
But October looms and now we’re told Kerry is back in the game, thanks to his bold new stand on Iraq. It contradicts several previous stands, but don’t worry: he plans to hold this one for at least a week or two. ‘Finally, Kerry Takes a Stand,’ cooed an approving headline in the New York Times. The fact that he’s taken a clear stand seems to be more important than the stand he’s taken. But, if you’re interested, his new stand on Iraq is that it’s a disaster and he’ll pull out, beginning next summer.
[...] So, as a crude way of casting a pall over Bush’s optimism, the Kerry tack might be effective. But I can’t see the message itself — ‘We’re losing anyway, so I’ll surrender faster’ — having much appeal to the American people. ‘We must make Iraq the world’s responsibility,’ he says. But, if it’s an American quagmire, why should anyone else get stuck in it?
Even if Kerry’s deft nuanced touch with the Franco-German outreach is as effective as he insists it is, it’s asking a lot to expect them to pick up the slack for what he calls ‘the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time’. ‘Why, Jean, you’re right, mon brave,’ Mr Chirac will say. ‘Your men have died in vain there. It’s only fair that ours should, too.’ And, even if you accept the dubious logic that Franco-German troops would be less provocative to Baathist dead-enders than Anglo-American ones, has Kerry done the math?
Say there are 140,000 US troops in Iraq when he takes office. He announces plans to bring home 10 per cent within two months. By what stretch of the imagination does he think the French and Germans are capable of producing 14,000 troops to replace them? I wrote a column the other day saying the glass in Iraq is about two thirds full. It’s not great, but it’s not as bad as the naysayers suggest.
The bulk of the violence is confined to one province and parts of Baghdad. The majority of Iraq’s provinces are calm. Many have functioning local government, under mainly secular or moderate representatives. There is no ‘civil war’. If there was, the Kurds would already be on their way out the door, since they’ve the most to lose by sticking with a non-functioning Iraq.
If there were 100,000 people agitating against Allawi’s government, CNN and the BBC would be showing it. But there aren’t, so they can’t.
[...] Kerry himself has held every conceivable position on Iraq. His current line is that he wouldn’t have gone near the joint: ‘Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator who deserves his own special place in hell. But that was not, in itself, a reason to go to war.’ A year ago, it was: ‘It was the right decision to disarm Saddam Hussein. And when the President made the decision, I supported him.’ Who knows what Kerry really thinks about Iraq? I don’t think he thinks about it much at all. I think he thinks about John Kerry most of the time. That’s one reason he’s such a bore.
But, in so far as one can divine anything from his thin Senate record, it’s a 20-year aversion to the projection of American power in America’s interest. I don’t reckon this is the man, temperamentally or intellectually, to finish the job in Iraq and to face down Iran and North Korea.
[...] And, just in time for the change of policy, comes a new ad from the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth focusing on another cheery snapshot from the John Kerry scrapbook of 35 years ago.
This one is about Kerry’s trip to Paris to meet negotiators from the North Vietnamese communist government and the south’s Provisional Revolutionary government. He was a Naval Reserve officer at the time, and many of my correspondents regard it as treason.
I’m not in favour of having Senator Kerry put on trial and executed; soccer moms and other swing voters may see that as over-reaching. But John O’Neill, the Swiftees’ spokesman, says, ‘It would be like an American today meeting with the heads of al-Qa’eda.’
Even if that line doesn’t catch on, the ad is nicely timed with Kerry’s Iraqi withdrawal strategy to paint the senator as the candidate of American defeatism, then and now.
I don’t think there’s a majority for that position in the country or in any of the battleground states. But, if you’re John Kerry’s campaign staff, what else is there?
The Boston Globe had a story this week with the sub-headline: ‘Advisors Strategize To Boost His “Likability”.’ Good luck with that one.
But even more telling is Mark Steyn's latest piece in the UK Spectator. Some highlights (read the whole thing here):
Kerry has spent two months doing everything wrong, beginning with his choice of running mate. His Vietnam nostalgia-night ‘reporting for duty’ convention speech was described by yours truly in the Telegraph as ‘verbose, shapeless, platitudinous, complacent, ill-disciplined, arrogant and humourless’. But most observers seemed to think it was a stroke of genius, and attributed the unprecedented lack of a post-convention poll bounce to the fact that Kerry was so good and so ahead of the game he’d gotten his post-convention bounce before the convention. This is an example of a phenomenon I’ve noted for a couple of years: the principal effect of America’s so-called ‘liberal media bias’ is that the Democratic party and the pro-Democrat press sustain each other’s delusions.
It happened again a week after the convention. The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth began their anti-Kerry campaign. The senator’s people assured the media that the charges were all false, the media assured the senator’s people that nobody in the press was going to go near the story. Partly as a result of this insulation from reality, by the end of August the underfunded veterans had driven Kerry’s numbers down, extracted crucial retractions of many of his most celebrated war stories, and forced the candidate into hiding, unable to risk giving an interview even to sympathetic TV softballers.
Desperate for payback for his month of SwiftVet hell, the thin-skinned Kerry demanded that his campaign went on the attack about Bush’s fitful National Guard service back in the Vietnam era. Nobody cares. But Dan Rather and CBS did a big story on whether Bush failed to show up for a physical in the War of 1812, and the Kerry campaign promptly lost most of September because Dan’s case had been built on laughably fake memos supplied as part of a convoluted deal involving the network, a man of dubious mental stability and key Kerry campaign contacts including Joe Lockhart, the former Clinton press secretary who was brought on board to get Kerry out of last month’s mess, not land him in this month’s.
[...] There is an attack dog on the Kerry team. Unfortunately, it’s his wife, and folks don’t like that in a prospective First Lady. Teresa Heinz Kerry dismisses her husband’s critics as ‘idiots’ and ‘scumbags’, and Kerry’s new advisers seem eager to limit her visibility. I’ve lost count of the number of Democrat women who’ve said to me that they can’t stand her.
So that was the state of play in mid-September: a candidate in hiding, a lightweight running-mate way out of his league, and a motor-mouth wife duct-taped and tossed into the cellar.
But October looms and now we’re told Kerry is back in the game, thanks to his bold new stand on Iraq. It contradicts several previous stands, but don’t worry: he plans to hold this one for at least a week or two. ‘Finally, Kerry Takes a Stand,’ cooed an approving headline in the New York Times. The fact that he’s taken a clear stand seems to be more important than the stand he’s taken. But, if you’re interested, his new stand on Iraq is that it’s a disaster and he’ll pull out, beginning next summer.
[...] So, as a crude way of casting a pall over Bush’s optimism, the Kerry tack might be effective. But I can’t see the message itself — ‘We’re losing anyway, so I’ll surrender faster’ — having much appeal to the American people. ‘We must make Iraq the world’s responsibility,’ he says. But, if it’s an American quagmire, why should anyone else get stuck in it?
Even if Kerry’s deft nuanced touch with the Franco-German outreach is as effective as he insists it is, it’s asking a lot to expect them to pick up the slack for what he calls ‘the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time’. ‘Why, Jean, you’re right, mon brave,’ Mr Chirac will say. ‘Your men have died in vain there. It’s only fair that ours should, too.’ And, even if you accept the dubious logic that Franco-German troops would be less provocative to Baathist dead-enders than Anglo-American ones, has Kerry done the math?
Say there are 140,000 US troops in Iraq when he takes office. He announces plans to bring home 10 per cent within two months. By what stretch of the imagination does he think the French and Germans are capable of producing 14,000 troops to replace them? I wrote a column the other day saying the glass in Iraq is about two thirds full. It’s not great, but it’s not as bad as the naysayers suggest.
The bulk of the violence is confined to one province and parts of Baghdad. The majority of Iraq’s provinces are calm. Many have functioning local government, under mainly secular or moderate representatives. There is no ‘civil war’. If there was, the Kurds would already be on their way out the door, since they’ve the most to lose by sticking with a non-functioning Iraq.
If there were 100,000 people agitating against Allawi’s government, CNN and the BBC would be showing it. But there aren’t, so they can’t.
[...] Kerry himself has held every conceivable position on Iraq. His current line is that he wouldn’t have gone near the joint: ‘Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator who deserves his own special place in hell. But that was not, in itself, a reason to go to war.’ A year ago, it was: ‘It was the right decision to disarm Saddam Hussein. And when the President made the decision, I supported him.’ Who knows what Kerry really thinks about Iraq? I don’t think he thinks about it much at all. I think he thinks about John Kerry most of the time. That’s one reason he’s such a bore.
But, in so far as one can divine anything from his thin Senate record, it’s a 20-year aversion to the projection of American power in America’s interest. I don’t reckon this is the man, temperamentally or intellectually, to finish the job in Iraq and to face down Iran and North Korea.
[...] And, just in time for the change of policy, comes a new ad from the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth focusing on another cheery snapshot from the John Kerry scrapbook of 35 years ago.
This one is about Kerry’s trip to Paris to meet negotiators from the North Vietnamese communist government and the south’s Provisional Revolutionary government. He was a Naval Reserve officer at the time, and many of my correspondents regard it as treason.
I’m not in favour of having Senator Kerry put on trial and executed; soccer moms and other swing voters may see that as over-reaching. But John O’Neill, the Swiftees’ spokesman, says, ‘It would be like an American today meeting with the heads of al-Qa’eda.’
Even if that line doesn’t catch on, the ad is nicely timed with Kerry’s Iraqi withdrawal strategy to paint the senator as the candidate of American defeatism, then and now.
I don’t think there’s a majority for that position in the country or in any of the battleground states. But, if you’re John Kerry’s campaign staff, what else is there?
The Boston Globe had a story this week with the sub-headline: ‘Advisors Strategize To Boost His “Likability”.’ Good luck with that one.
