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# Posted 2:06 PM by Patrick Belton

PATRICK'S OBLIGATORY MUSINGS ON DOMESTIC POLITICS: Booo-oooring. Oh, sorry, I was distracted by watching the Simpsons there. I'm all for asking a great deal of our politicians, but I stop at expecting them to do the impossible. On Iraq, I don't see how Kerry can at present do anything other than make a distinction without a difference. If he comes down against the Iraq War, he allows himself to be painted as a McGovern-like dovish candidate; for it, and he loses the support of the Democratic prospectives whose support for the war may have been tepid to cold.

Glancing forward to the coming campaign, I also don't see much hope in predicting foreign policy differences - a.k.a., with regard to Iraq - from campaign statements, which will consist of months of trying to score valence points: being the closer candidate, not to policies, but to themes everyone is for, ones which generally poll well. Better, probably, to look at who's advising them, and then at their prior careers. Exception to the Belton Rule (no, make that Lemma; I've always wanted to own a Lemma): performance at debate at least reveals familiarity with the stuff of policy. In this, Kerry shone far above all of his primary opponents (I except Lieberman, selfishly). You may not have agreed with everything he was saying, but you did at least have to concede, when he spoke at the Council on Foreign Relations, that he knew what he was talking about.

As a final note, in a peculiar personal exercise in escapism, I'm at the moment writing a book chapter on the oratorical culture of the Senate in the nineteenth century, when statesmen of the like of Webster and Douglas held policy conversations stretching over days, not 4-second CNN soundbites. Mmmm....nineteenth century.....

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