Cartoonists have this delightful ability to get to the heart of the matter.
Like the cartoon I saw recently: President Bush and Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry are competing paint salesmen. Behind Kerry, there is a wall of buckets of gray paint–in every imaginable shade. Behind Bush, there are just two buckets, labeled black and white.
So America, what’ll it be?
Under normal circumstances, you might think it would be a good thing to have a presidential candidate who was thoughtful, deliberative and eager to wrestle with the complexity of every important issue.
I have great respect for those who can seek out the middle ground on a variety of domestic issues, from school vouchers to abortion to affirmative action. That’s not easy to do when people on the political extremes are constantly trying to pull you to their side.
And yet, these are not normal circumstances. When the country is at war and the question on the table is how best to fight and win that war–and when one reason the country was drawn into war in the first place is because there’s an international network of terrorists intent on slaughtering Americans–you don’t need nuance. You need clarity.
You won’t find much of it in what is, by now, Kerry’s murky position on the war in Iraq. After months of trying to get the maximum political benefit by painting himself as both a tough guy ready to be commander in chief and a tough critic of the war started by his opponent, Kerry was finally pinned down and forced to choose.
It wasn’t pretty.
Last week, a reporter asked Kerry to answer a question that the Bush-Cheney campaign has been raising for several weeks: If Kerry knew then–that is, more than a year ago–what he knows now about the inability to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, would the senator have still voted to authorize the invasion of that country and the ouster of Saddam Hussein? Yes or no?
Kerry said yes, conceding that he still would have given the president the authority to go to war. But at the same time, Kerry continued to take issue with what the president did with the authority he was given.
Not so fast, senator.
Has Kerry forgotten all the verbal missiles at the Democratic National Convention about how Bush “misled” the country into war? One of the hottest selling campaign buttons at the event was quite empathic: “Bush lied. People died.”
No nuance there.
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Does Kerry even recall what he said in his acceptance speech about protecting Americans against “a threat that was real and imminent” being the “only justification for going to war” %% hat was obviously an attempt to get some political mileage out of the fact that no weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq. And yet now, just a few weeks later, Kerry says that, weapons or no weapons, he still would have voted to authorize the war.
And with that, the slogan of the Kerry-Edwards campaign went from: “Hope is on the way” to “Oh, never mind.”
That’s quite a rhetorical blunder by Kerry. And yet President Bush is in a poor position to take advantage of it. That’s because Bush is a lot more vulnerable on the war issue than many of his supporters like to admit. Bush comes across to many Americans as bullheaded and arrogant, refusing to admit the existence of mistakes, let alone claim responsibility for them. There are plenty of mistakes in Iraq–from the fractured chain of command at Abu Ghraib to the administration’s unwillingness to commit enough troops at the outset.
Those were dreadful errors in judgment for which someone has to be held accountable. At least that’s what I hear from a group of voters I call the Bush defectors. I have run across them everywhere I go, and hear from them regularly in my e-mails. These are people who say they pulled the lever for Bush four years ago, but who vow not to make that mistake again.
If enough of them make their views heard in November, it won’t matter much whether Kerry is, on the war, a hawk or a dove. Bush’s goose could be cooked.
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E-mail: rnavarretteATSIGNdallasnews.com
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