If Election Hinges on Iraq, Kerry May Need Added Firepower

LA Times ^ | May 3, 2004 | Ronald Brownstein

[Cincinatus' Wife]

.....A CBS/New York Times survey released last week showed that approval of Bush's handling of the war plummeted to 41%, dragging his overall approval rating below the 50% level that historically marks the dividing line between presidents who win reelection and those who don't.

Those numbers are certain to fluctuate in the months ahead. Yet they underscore the threat to the president. The centerpiece in his case for reelection is that he has been a resolute and effective manager in the war on terrorism. His signature contribution to that war has been the invasion of Iraq. Last week's poll numbers suggest that if Americans come to see that decision as misguided, or the occupation as failing, the central arch of Bush's support could erode.

But that doesn't mean Kerry will automatically benefit. Instead, he faces a paradox. The more Americans focus on Iraq, the more they seem to weigh credibility as commander in chief when choosing between the candidates.

And despite their anxieties about the occupation, far more Americans say they trust Bush rather than Kerry to safeguard the nation's security.

Kerry may narrow that gap somewhat as more voters learn about his experience as a combat veteran in Vietnam and his nearly 20 years on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. But that story alone probably won't solve his problem, especially with the Bush campaign spending so heavily on television advertisements that paint Kerry as weak on defense......

[Cincinatus' Wife]

NOTE: This cartoon will expire and a new one will show tomorrow.

Houston Chronicle

Kerry's World: Father Knows Best***"Americans," he writes, "are inclined to see the world and foreign affairs in black and white." They celebrate their own form of government and denigrate all others, making them guilty of what he calls "ethnocentric accommodation -- everyone ought to be like us." As a result, America has committed the "fatal error" of "propagating democracy" and fallen prey to "the siren's song of promoting human rights," falsely assuming that our values and institutions are a good fit in the Third World. And, just as Americans exaggerate their own goodness, they exaggerate their enemies' badness. The Soviet Union wasn't nearly as imperialistic as American politicians warned, Kerry argues. "Seeing the Soviet Union as the aggressor in every instance, and the U.S. as only reacting defensively, relieves an American observer from the need to see any parallel between our use of military power in distant parts of the world, and the Soviet use of military power outside the Soviet Union," he writes. He further claims that "Third world Marxist movements were autonomous national movements" -- outside Moscow's orbit. The book culminates in a plea for a hardheaded, realist foreign policy that removes any pretense of U.S. moral superiority.

Despite its blunt arguments, The Star-Spangled Mirror received little attention. Foreign Affairs greeted it with a 90-word summation in its review section. But the work of Richard Kerry, who passed away in 2000, will soon experience posthumous reconsideration. It won't be because of the renewed relevance of his arguments (although his book does read like a contemporary brief against neoconservatism). It will be because his son is a leading candidate to run U.S. foreign policy.

According to the conventional telling of John Kerry's biography, largely told by Kerry himself, his foreign policy views were forged in the Mekong Delta. During his disillusioning four-month combat stint on a Navy Swift Boat, the limits of U.S. power were revealed to him. As Newsweek argued in a cover story last month, "Kerry's policy views, as well as his politics, were profoundly shaped by the war." But, for all the neatness this narrative provides, it overlooks an entire chapter in Kerry's intellectual history: his childhood. In fact, Kerry's foreign policy worldview, characterized by a steadfast belief in international institutions and a suspicion of U.S. hard power, had fallen into place long before he ever enlisted. As Kerry's biographer, the historian Douglas Brinkley, told me, "So much of his foreign policy worldview comes straight from Richard Kerry."

[meenie]

Kerry is trying to ride Bush's coattail into the White House. His plan is to be more interventionist, more war like, more defense oriented than Bush. Unforunately for him, his anti-war past keeps popping up. Trying to ride the fence between those who want more war and those who want less war is extremely hard to do and retain credibility.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Kerry's trapped by his own weaseling ways. That's justice.

[The Raven]

I was wondering what would happen to me if the LA Times and NYT wrote my job performance review each year with the same objectivity.

[lainde]

bttt