OxBlog

Sunday, August 01, 2004

# Posted 11:51 PM by Ariel David Adesnik  

NYT ATTACKS KERRY FROM THE LEFT: It may have gone soft in its coverage of the Kerry and Edwards acceptance speeches. But the NYT is ripping the Democratic candidate to shreds in its editorials and op-ed columns.

Given the NYT's interest in throwing George W. Bush out of office, I'm quite surprised at its constant and impractical efforts to push Kerry to the left on foreign affairs. On Thursday, a masthead editoral asserted that "Mr. Kerry's history on the critical Iraq question has been impossibly opaque":
Mr. Bush still insists that he was right to invade. He says the war was justified because of Mr. Hussein's military ambitions and because Iraq is better off without him.

Voters need to know whether Mr. Kerry agrees...while voters are certainly prepared to accept a candidate with a complex worldview, they also value the courage that comes with occasionally taking a leap and giving an answer that's straight and simple.
Then on Friday, the morning after Kerry's acceptance speech, the editors challenge Sen. Kerry to
provide a clear vision on Iraq. Voters needed to hear him say that he understands, in retrospect, that his vote to give President Bush Congressional support to invade was a mistake. It's clear now that Mr. Kerry isn't going to go there, and it's a shame.
While the NYT is entitled to its opinion, that opinion clashes mightily with NYT political correspondents' constant insistence that Kerry can't win without demonstrating that he is just as tough as Bush on national security. For example, in its article about the Edwards speech, the authors described one passage as
"aimed at what many consider Mr. Kerry's principal vulnerability in his fiercely competitive race with President Bush: that voters still tend to trust Mr. Bush more to keep them safe according to polls.
While the Times editorials assert that Mr. Kerry could overcome his reputation for flip-flopping by taking a firm position against the war, doing so would open Kerry up to devastating attacks from the GOP. He voted for the war, but now he's against it. Kerry would then defend his position by saying that we didn't find WMD.

Journalists would then ask whether given the information available as of March 2003, whether going to war was the right choice. If Kerry still says it was wrong, he would be contradcting his actual vote. If he says it was right, then he'd be contradicting the new anti-war stance the Times recommends. And if he fudges the answer, he'd open himself up to justified charges of flip-flop fence sitting.

Bush's decision to force a Senate vote on the war in the fall of 2002 may have been politically motivated, but that doesn't mean Kerry can shake off responsibility for his vote. His optimal strategy now is to pull of his fence-sitting act as best he can. Coming out against the war (in hindsight) would severely damage Kerry's effort to court middle-ground voters.

That lesson, however, seems to be lost on the NYT. The same is true in spades for Maureen Dowd and Barbara Ehrenreich. The former complains that
The Democrats think the way to overthrow the Republicans is to mimic Republicans. Democratic rivalries are tamped down; liberal losers are kept offstage or out of prime time; the positive message - strength, heroism and patriotism - is relentlessly drummed in. The Swift boat crewmen are toted everywhere to vouch that John Kerry is a comrade, not just a set of political calculations.
Ehrenreich adds that
The idea, according to the pundits, is that with more than half of the voters still favoring Bush as the guy to beat bin Laden, Kerry needs to show that he's macho enough to whup the terrorists...

So here in one word is my new counterterrorism strategy for Kerry: feminism.
You have to read it to believe it. In the name of ideological purity, Dowd, Ehrenreich and the NYT editorial board are calling on Kerry to commit political suicide. I would counsel otherwise, if only because I can't take any more of this unholy trinity's self-righteous anti-Bush rants.
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