In a speech this past Monday, Senator Kerry made the following quote in regards to the current administration’s handling of the Iraq war.
'The president misled, miscalculated and mismanaged every aspect of this undertaking and he has made the achievement of our objective, a stable Iraq, secure within its borders, with a representative government, far harder to achieve than it ever should have been.'
On it’s own the statement is not that different from similar rhetoric being used throughout the campaign. Kerry’s position, and that of his party, is that President Bush lied about the reasons to go to war and it has left us in a quagmire that is costing lives every day. In reading this quote, you can understand that. But what you also must understand, and more so anticipate, is the response the GOP fired back. Surely, the Kerry camp must have anticipated it, thus making the stupidity in making such a statement that much more reprehensible.
Right off the bat, Attack Dog Cheney spun it to his favor explaining that what John Kerry means is that the US and Iraq would be better and safer with Saddam still in power, i.e., John Kerry likes Saddam and is soft on terror and therefore must not be elected. It’s so easy it could have written itself. So again, why would Kerry, and his team, expose themselves for such obvious attacks? It is these types questions that irk me to no end as I realize more and more that he won’t win this election.
Playing devil’s advocate for a second, didn’t Kerry vote for the war in the first place? Doesn’t his stance now reverse that? And you wonder why they deride him as a flip-flopper? Yes, all of those questions have answer to explain his actions, but in our sound bite culture, who has time for complicated answers? We should, considering we are dealing with matters of life and death, but we don’t, which is sad, but still the truth.
The answers to such questions can be given just as easily as the GOP spins out sound bites against Kerry. Yes, Kerry voted for the war, because for starters, he and everyone else was lied to about the reasoning behind it, but even more so, if he voted against it he would be deemed “soft on terror” and his campaign would have died at conception. Yes, his stance has changed over time, but is that such a bad thing? It is a sign of an enlightened thinker to question his beliefs from time to time and decide accordingly. Being decisive in itself is not an admirable quality, as who is to know if you chosen course of action is the right one? And to be unwilling to deviate from that course prevents the possibility of discourse and real political thought which drives all successful governments.
All of which is fine and good and makes sense if you take time to think about it. But again, and this can be said plainly enough, the average voter has shown they have neither the time nor the interest to think about it. If you can’t sum it up in a small article, or nightly news report, if it requires the person to think about it on their own time, then odds are it is a dead issue. Certainly there are scores of voters who do put forth the effort, but our dismal voting percentages and the sheer enormity of undecided voters proves that we don’t.
In our democracy, a government constructed to be for the people and the by the people, the people don’t really seem to care anymore. All of which signals an eventual death knell for the Kerry campaign. They are trying to engage the voter in a cerebral sense, when the truth is, one that the Bush campaign knows all too well, is that we are no longer a cerebral society but one that is all about sights and sounds in short intervals. Until Team Kerry realizes this, and it may be too late already, they will not be celebrating come November 2nd.
