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This article is from the New Republic and I concur because I too don't feel like Kerry has been tested yet as to whether he can take the punches. Whether you agree/not I believe valid points are raised here.
February 1, 2004
JOHN KERRY'S GLASS JAW: Last week I suggested that it might not be in John Kerry's interest to blow out Howard Dean in New Hampshire, since that would effectively eliminate Dean from the race, leaving him bitter and disaffected and sitting on a pile of cash. But as Dean sharpens his message in the stretch run to tomorrow's vote, I'm not sure how long Kerry can afford to have Dean stick around either.
In my mind, the biggest problem with Kerry's glide path to victory is that he's yet to prove he can take a punch. The one time he took one--from Dean, on his war stance last spring and summer--he immediately hit the floor. Of course, the media accounts these days are littered with testimonials to Kerry's "electability," which is what his surge in Iowa and New Hampshire is largely attributed to. But surely this dynamic has much less to do with Kerry's electability than with Dean's perceived unelectability, which grew and grew in the weeks leading up to Iowa and then went off the charts following Dean's post-caucus speech. An unelectable opponent does not an electable candidate make.
The media (see, for example, yesterday's "Meet the Press") has also pushed the line that Dean's challenge has strengthened Kerry as a candidate--Dean is now credited with everything from livening up and shortening Kerry's stump speech to the Kerry campaign's increased organizational efficiency. But the reality is close to the opposite: If Kerry wins the nomination, the practical effect of the Dean candidacy will be to have made Kerry the beneficiary of an almost an unprecedented confluence of favorable circumstances, which allowed Kerry to win the nomination without ever being tested.
To see this, consider this rough history of the campaign: Last summer, Dean seizes the front-runner mantle from Kerry and runs up an early lead in Iowa and New Hampshire, locking up large numbers of committed supporters. The effect is to make it difficult not only for Kerry to get traction in the race, but for any other candidate to get traction, as well. Then Dean proceeds to melt down--which sends people scurrying back to Kerry, who, as the former front-runner, is best positioned to re-absorb their support. (Again, no one other than Kerry has had a chance to emerge as an alternative to Dean during all the months Dean is padding his lead. Because of that, Kerry remains the de facto alternative.) And then, to cap things off, the instant conventional wisdom about how Dean (and Gephardt) lost Iowa is that they were too negative--which makes every candidate reluctant to criticize the new front-runner from this point forward. In a nutshell, Dean took a lot of voters out of play early and sat on them, then handed them over to Kerry just before the voting started, then made it virtually impossible for anyone to win them back. Kerry, as the beneficiary of such an incredible set of circumstances, does not strike me as a battle-hardened candidate. He strikes me as an extremely lucky SOB.
Which brings me back to Dean's new message and why it's not at all clear Kerry can survive being on the receiving end of it for very long. Dean is now attacking Kerry for being on the wrong side of not one, but two, Iraq wars--the first of which happened to be both enormously popular and enormously successful. Dean's message is obviously a two-fer (or maybe even a three-fer): It casts Dean as someone who stands firmly within the foreign policy mainstream, it casts Kerry as someone who tilts with the prevailing political winds (or political wisdom), at least within the Democratic Party (where the first Gulf war was less popular than in the country at large), and it casts Kerry, who still defends his Gulf war no-vote, as either downright incoherent or, if you're more charitably inclined, too nuanced by half.
So what was Kerry's response to Dean's charge? As The Washington Post lays it out today:
"I said we ought to draw a line in the sand, couldn't have been more clear. But we had a very divided nation," he said. "That was actually a vote to go at that time, and I thought we ought to take a couple more months to build the support of the nation."
Like I said, I see no reason to believe Kerry can take a punch.
OH, AND ONE OTHER THING: Kerry's other defense against this Dean salvo is, not surprisingly, to invoke his experience in Vietnam:
"Those of us who served in Vietnam have a searing memory of what happens when presidents and politicians make decisions to send young people to war and the country isn't fully supportive of it," he said. "If things go wrong--which they often do in war--you want the support of the nation."
Forgive me for indulging my inner Andrew Sullivan here, but doesn't this amount to a complete abdication of leadership? Surely there are times when the use of military force is both morally imperative and either highly controversial or altogether opposed by the American public--Bosnia, Rwanda, and Kosovo all come to mind. Isn't it the role of the president to overcome this reluctance and do the right thing anyway?
And, more relevant to the campaign, if Kerry can't do better than this against Howard Dean, how on earth is he going to take on George W. Bush?
www.tnr.com
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