Why Kerry should not talk about war

Gerard Baker:

In John Frankenheimer's original, electrifying 1962 thriller, The Manchurian Candidate, an American soldier is captured by communists during the Korean War, brainwashed and programmed to return to the United States and, years later, to assassinate a presidential candidate.

There is compelling evidence now that John Kerry is a kind of Manchurian Candidate of Democratic politics. It seems entirely possible that at some point in his career, he was seized by a youthful Karl Rove, brainwashed and programmed to kill off, at crucial moments in American history, the Democratic party’s political prospects.

The clues were there all along, if we’d only looked closely enough. His curious combination of self-satisfied superiority and baffled indecisiveness was obviously too contradictory a mental characteristic to be natural. His ponderous oratorical style and studied condescension suggested something artificial had interfered with the firing of the synapses.

But the plot worked brilliantly. In 2004, as the party’s presidential candidate, Mr Kerry contrived to throw away a golden opportunity for a Democratic victory against an increasingly unpopular incumbent fighting an increasingly unpopular war.

Startlingly, this week, with the Democrats on the brink of their first clear victory in congressional elections for 14 years, the Manchurian Candidate seized a rare second chance to assassinate his party. Speaking to a crowd of students in California, Mr Kerry mused on the importance of education: “If you make the most of it, if you study hard and you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.”

Now it is entirely plausible that Mr Kerry did not mean to insult the intelligence and diligence of all who serve in the US military, and that he was merely bungling a rather predictable joke about President Bush’s supposed intellectual shortcomings.

But the ambiguity of the remark, coupled with the Massachusetts senator having a bit of form when it comes to making demeaning remarks about American soldiers, was unfortunate to say the least. Whatever Americans think of the war in Iraq, they harbour a deep respect for their men and women in uniform. The clumsy gaffe clearly required an urgent clarification and an apology.

...

But the incident has shone a rare spotlight, in this critical midterm election campaign, on the Democratic Party. The reason it received so much attention, and so alarmed Democrats, is that it threatened to undermine the party’s entire strategy for taking control of Congress.

Since the election battle was joined months ago, the Democratic approach has been to keep the attention on the Republican Party. As long as the election is about the unpopular President Bush and his fellow Republicans in congress, voters are inevitably much more likely to vote against them. When a party has dominated, as the Republicans have done for the past six years, the debate focuses on their shortcomings, which are not in short supply.

But elections also require voters to choose between alternatives, and Democrats have been extremely anxious not to talk about what they will do if they win on Tuesday. Other than a few old commitments to raising the minimum wage and re-examining tax cuts, there is no 2006 Democratic equivalent of the “Contract with America” that Republicans brought to Washington when they won control of Congress in 1994.

...

Kerry has blown the cover on the incoherence of Democrat positions on the war and their complete inability to lead anyone anywhere on the war because of the quagmires of their minds. They try to keep silent on their desire for defeat, because they know that will not succeed even in blue states like Connecticut where their guy who was honest about his position on the war is behind by 12 percent. It is hard to get a mandate when you are this dishonest about what you want to do.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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

29 % of companies say they are unlikely to keep insurance after Obamacare

Bin Laden's concern about Zarqawi's remains