Privately, but no longer quietly, Democrats are beginning to despair.
They cannot fathom why their man, John Kerry, cannot seem to fathom how easy it should be to put President Bush away, seize the high ground and take command of the issues of the war on Iraq and the war on terror.
Yet another Democrat pundit who has confused the opinion of his friends with popular opinion. He goes on to say that Kerry ought to unreservedly assert the left-liberal line on the war; i.e., we were lied to, we'd have never done it, we need to get out now, it was all a mistake, etc. The problem with that, of course, is that Kerry's own pollsters have probably concluded that such a strategy would loose him the election.
It's why Kerry saluted during his acceptance speech, why he talked about little else but his war experience, why he has said that he'd back the war regardless of how things have turned out. That he'd fight the war, but do it better. The left wing of the Democrat Party despairs that Kerry is not singing their tune. What they don't seem to recognise is that too few people out there like that tune. It is just another sign of the decline of power and influence of the left.
Yeah, the problem with a guy like Kerry is that you never know who he'll backstab next. It could be you, red diaper bone fides and all.
On the other hand, the nice thing about having a candidate with no set principles is the way in which you can exactly match the candidate with current popular opinion, whatever that might be, pretty much without regard for what that candidate has stood for in the past.
And on the third hand, I find this all oddly reassuring. For a while I believed that Kerry would be like Carter, a president apparently determined to destroy the country. Now I can see that Kerry is nothing like Carter. Carter was an evil little man who despised his own country and believed all of its citizens were evil for being prosperous, but he had a set of convictions, quasi-Marxist convictions, most likely, but convictions nevertheless. And he stuck with those convictions straight through one of the worst four year terms the country has seen, determined to punish the people of the US for being optimistic, productive, competent, and hopeful in the face of so much misery elsewhere.* Kerry, on the other hand, is going to go wherever the wind blows and is unlikely to do anything with the office.
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*And then after he'd been tossed out on his ear by the election, he had the gall to come before the people in a TV address and try to put a guilt trip on us for declining to partake in another 4 years of punishment with him, as if he hadn't been hard enough with the whip, or something. But don't get me started on that.
And, by the way, forget about Kerry being able to win allies in Europe. The people who insulted the American people by giving Jimmy Carter the Nobel Prize hate the US far too much to ever be our allies except as a pretext for screwing us over.