I'll admit that some of the anti-Kerry diaries around here are just getting a little absurd. That's regrettable. But I think there are still major, legitimate questions left unanswered about his campaign. For me the most pressing is, "What does this guy run on?"
It just seems that given his record, it would be hard for him to attack Bush on major political fronts.
Consider foreign policy. Kerry's foreign policy credentials are indeed better than Bush had when he first ran. Almost any Senator's would be. But Bush is a sitting President and it seems less likely that the media would be willing to buy that comparison today. Kerry's case here is also weakened by his support of every major foreign policy initiative George W. Bush has offered.
Most importantly, that includes the war in Iraq. Kerry's position here may be genuine, but it certainly has its share of problems. First of all, it's almost indecipherable to most people (I don't say that to be mean; it took me a while to really grasp what he was trying to do, and if I'm still wrong then I hope you guys call me on it). If I understand it correctly, he was against military action, but he voted to give George W. Bush authority to launch any sort of military invasion he wanted because Kerry was under the impression that the Administration would use the war resolution as a bargaining chip against the United Nations. Basically, the logic goes, by giving the President authority to do something that Kerry thought was stupid and unecessary, he would be forcing the United Nations to step in and stop us.
To me that argument has a lot of flaws. First, it sort of shoots holes in Kerry's multilateralist persona; you don't show respect to an international democratic organization by starting your negotiations with an ultimatum. Second, he comes off as extremely gullible; the possibility of war in Iraq had been discussed in the popular press almost as soon as Bush was elected. Heck, even THE ONION caught on to it. If Kerry really didn't think Bush would use a Congressional mandate to launch exactly that war, he would seem to be a little...well... naive.
I don't think John Kerry was naive. I think he was making a decison based on political expediency. Now to be fair, in doing so he was aligning with the rest of the Democratic party. The plan was to "take foreign policy issues away from the Republicans" in order to sweep the 2002 midterm elections, remember? I think this view of Kerry's vote is also backed up by the swiftness with which he restated an explicitly hawkish position after Saddam's capture (a turnaround that even Kerryphile Eric Alterman noted with dismay).
Flip flops like that make it even harder for Kerry to legitimately attack Bush. The Gulf War I letters (in which he wrote different constituents that he was both for and against that war) are another good example of this. I'm sure that a careful study of Kerry's voting history will yield more such flip-flops, and I'm really dreading the prospect of those legislative reversals hurting us during the general election. This also makes it much harder for Kerry to take Bush to task for things like the lack of funding for NCLB, the lack of funding for AIDS relief, and the infamous stem-cell decision. You can hardly accuse the President of flip-flopping when you yourself are fighting accusations of flip-flopping.
Kerry's on firmer ground with domestic issues. He's more able to draw a clear line between himself and Bush. But at the same time, many of his proposals in this area seem to be half-steps. Take deficit reduction... Kerry favors a very limited rollback of the Bush tax cuts. That is, he favors keeping the majority of the cuts in place while raising taxes on the wealthy. This doesn't even come close to balancing the budget, and Kerry doesn't even deny that fact. So how will he campaign on this issue? "By raising some of your taxes, I'll slow the rate of deficit growth!" Wow that's a rallying cry...
It would also be hard for him to make that "tax the wealthy" populist argument. Regardless of how he's campaigning today, the man is clearly a part of Boston's wealthy elite. His deep ties with special interests (why yes, he did take more money from lobbyists than any other Senator in the past 15 years) will also hurt that populist image.
I dunno, I guess I'm just dreading a campaign where our candidate is delivering hollow plans for dealing with terrorism, the economy, the budget, and foreign policy while he's simultaneously being picked apart by the Republicans on those issues. Can any Kerry supporters out there give me some reason to be optimistic? What's an issue that John Kerry can legitimately run on?