WHO GETS TO BE BERNARD SHAW?:

DAMAGE CONTROL: Voters need to believe that John Kerry can put the country back on track. (PHILIP GOUREVITCH, 2004-07-26, The New Yorker)

Ten years ago, Henry Kissinger identified “two contradictory attitudes toward foreign policy” in American history: “The first is that America serves its values best by perfecting democracy at home, thereby acting as a beacon for the rest of mankind; the second, that America’s values impose on it an obligation to crusade for them around the world.” Adherents of the America-as-beacon school were disposed toward isolationism, while those who subscribed to the notion of America as crusader were compelled to commit America abroad. When Bush ran for President, four years ago, he was an old-school beacon man, hostile to “nation building” and the overextension of American forces. After September 11th, he came out as a crusader, with an absolutist twist—a unilateralism so uncompromising that, as Kerry put it to me, “we’re the ones isolated.”

Despite the bloody and embittering disarray of Iraqi life after more than a year under the American dispensation, Bush describes the Iraq adventure as a great success for the cause of freedom—exactly as he said it would be before the war. The main change in attitude lies in the grammatical perspective, a shift in tense from future perfect to present continuous. If anything, Bush’s insistence on the righteousness of his script has intensified. He jokes about never reading newspapers, lets it be known that he communicates with the Almighty, and dismisses his critics as pessimists. He told the nation that if he had made any mistakes he was unaware of them, and he said, “I fully understand the consequences of what we’re doing. We’re changing the world.”

Last month on c-span, Kerry responded, “If you haven’t made mistakes, you’re not a living human.” By way of an example, he pointed to his own Senate vote, in October of 2002, for the Iraq war resolution. His mistake, he said, was “to trust what the President said” at the time. But Kerry didn’t repudiate his vote; he never has, even when the temptation was enormous. On the day after his appearance at the Council on Foreign Relations, last December, he spent the better part of two hours at the Upper West Side apartment of the comedian and Democratic activist Al Franken, trying to justify the vote to a couple of dozen pundits and reporters. It was a parochial gathering, all male, overwhelmingly Jewish, and, with the exception of a few professional agnostics, openly identified as liberal or, at least, unhappy with Bush. A friendly crowd, you would think, but Kerry tied himself in knots, rehashing all the what-ifs that he’d struggled with following Bush’s challenge to the U.N., a day after the first anniversary of the September 11th attacks: Join us in enforcing the many long-standing Security Council resolutions against Iraq, or we’ll do it our way without you. No politician at the time doubted Saddam’s mendacity, or questioned the existence of his arsenal of illegal weapons of mass destruction, and Bush promised that he would make war only as a last resort, and only with the fullest possible international support. It was obvious to Kerry that a President should have the authority to back up diplomacy with force, and he had announced before casting his vote that he was voting not for war but to prevent it. The attitude at Franken’s place was: Yes, sure, but how could you? Kerry said again that he’d been misled, and, when that still wasn’t good enough for some, he shouldered a measure of blame. “I believed,” he said, and he repeated the phrase several times: “I believed.”

Reporters will be tripping over themselves to be the ones who reduce him to that kind of tonque-tied quivering mess in the debates.

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 9, 2004 12:10 AM