The polls are settling down to the point where, depending where you look, George W. Bush either no longer has a double-digit lead or won't have it much longer. For the last few days though, there's been a lot of panic from Kerry supporters who felt the election slipping away from them. A lot of them used the opportunity to lecture Kerry that he needs to be more negative…to get up there and say that Bush has completely bungled the Iraq War. This may or may not be proper election strategy but in some cases, I think they're lecturing Kerry because they've always felt he was being too nice, and maybe that Democrats too often lose because they won't fight as hard as their opponents. A lot of folks feel that the rationales by which Bush declares the war under control and the economy in recovery are fragile arguments that won't withstand a few tough questions that no one is asking.
Not that anyone who can do anything about it is going to see this but I think Kerry's problem is that he often misses the emotional core of a problem. He's right…but he's not right in a way that fires up voters. Here's a statement he issued today that's as good an example of this as anything…
George W. Bush wishes he and I had the same position on Iraq but wishing doesn't make it so. I have said repeatedly that when it comes to Iraq, I wouldn't have done just one thing differently, I would have done almost everything differently. George Bush's wrongheaded, go-it-alone Iraq policy has created a quagmire, costing us $200 billion and counting. As a result, George Bush is shortchanging America on everything from education to health care to job creation — making it more difficult to meet our needs here at home.
I believe that's all true but I also think Kerry is missing the "money quote," the line that will get folks angry enough at Bush-Cheney to do something about it. You know what's missing in the above statement? Nearly a thousand brave American soldiers dead and countless more injured or maimed for life. The $200 billion is bad but the death toll is what wars are ultimately about. Instead of saying that Bush's inept policies have cost us lives, Kerry's turning the war into a bad domestic economic policy. A lot of our citizens want desperately to believe that something Bush has done or will do makes that next terrorist attack less likely, so Kerry needs to remind America that there are, if anything, more people in the world now who think the killing of Americans is a good thing.
By the time you read this, we may have topped 1,000 U.S. service deaths in connection with the Iraq war — an amazing number of those since Bush declared "Mission accomplished" or since Howard Dean was scolded for saying that the capture of Saddam hadn't made the world safer for us. I think Mr. Kerry needs to stop talking about health care and job creation for a few days and mention all those flag-draped coffins the press isn't allowed to photograph. Yeah, it's the economy, stupid, but a lot of Americans are now prepared to settle for a weak economy if they think the guy in the White House can protect them.