Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Kerry's market tested pap

Joe Klien:

John Kerry suffered a small embarrassment last week that illuminated a big problem in his campaign. The embarrassment involved the not exactly riveting issue of troop redeployments. George W. Bush announced last Monday in a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) that he wanted to bring around 70,000 troops home from Germany and North Korea over the next 10 years. In principle, that is not very controversial. The military and foreign policy priesthoods have favored that sort of restructuring since the end of the cold war. And yet, when Kerry spoke to the VFW two days later, he attacked Bush's position, using an argument with some merit but of microscopic import in the midst of a presidential campaign: he said it was a "hasty" and "political" plan and certainly not a good negotiating tactic to withdraw troops from Korea while we are trying to get the North Koreans to drop their nuclear program.

But oops. Some two weeks earlier, in an interview with George Stephanopoulos, Kerry had taken a different position: "I think we can significantly change the deployment of troops, not just [in Iraq] but ... in the Korean peninsula, perhaps, in Europe, perhaps." As you might imagine, the Bush campaign quickly pointed out the inconsistency.

The stumble raises two basic questions about Kerry's campaign. First, is he a latter-day Ron Burgundy—the idiot 1970s anchorman of Will Ferrell's recent film who would read anything that appeared on his TelePrompTer? Did Kerry not remember what he had said to Stephanopoulos? No, it was, apparently, yet another Kerry nanonuance: he is in favor of redeployments, just not now. The second question is far more dire: Why is Kerry wasting breath on such periphera? Why isn't he hammering Bush on his conduct of the Iraq war and the larger war against Islamist radicalism, which is the most important issue in this election?

The answer is politics. His political consultants don't want him to do it. Their focus groups tell them that the public wants an "optimistic" candidate who offers a "positive plan" rather than a "negative" candidate who criticizes the President. Of course, "every focus group in the history of the world has wanted a candidate with a 'positive plan for the future,'" says James Carville. Unfortunately, focus-group members are also human beings. In a roomful of strangers, they present their most noble selves. They hate political attacks—but not really. They have obviously responded to the scurrilous Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign against Kerry's war record, which is why he was forced, finally, to counterattack last week. The Swifties' ability to dominate the news with incendiary nonsense is, I believe, a direct result of Kerry's unwillingness to dominate the news with tart, controversial substance by challenging the President on Iraq.

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Kerry does not have to be specific about what he would do in Iraq—the situation on the ground changes daily, so how can he know?—but I suspect the public needs to hear, in plain and forceful language, Kerry's opinion of what Bush has done and whether it has been good for America. Instead, Kerry has offered only vague criticisms and an increasingly implausible promise to lure our allies into the chaos. In a year of real crises—the "most important election of our lifetime," he says—Kerry's nostrums sound distressingly like market-tested pap.

Klein is wrong in his description of the Swiftvets. They are not scurrilous nor is what they are saying nonsense. These are serious people who served honorable and are angry that Kerry dishonored their service. They have raised legitimate issues of fact about Kerry's service. Klein and other liberal media types seem to think it is ok for Kerry to slander the troops and the entire command structure in vietnam with truly scurrilous charges but it is somehow wrong to raise questions of fact about Kerry's service.