E-Mail This Article to a Friend Wake-up call (continued)

• Dial "Z" for Zell. It would be one thing if Georgia senator and nominal Democrat Zell Miller had delivered a keynote address in New York that was merely full of ridiculously over-the-top claims ("For more than 20 years, on every one of the great issues of freedom and security, John Kerry has been more wrong, more weak, and more wobbly than any other national figure") and fascistic impulses (here’s what Miller said of the Democrats’ decision actually to run a candidate against Bush: "Now, while young Americans are dying in the sands of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan, our nation is being torn apart and made weaker because of the Democrats’ manic obsession to bring down our commander-in-chief").

But, in fact, Miller’s speech was much worse than that, and thus more useful: his keynote was full of such grotesque distortions that it amounted to one big lie. Miller’s speech may have done Kerry real damage; but if the Kerry campaign has any sense, it can now turn the speech around and use it to attack Bush’s credibility. Imagine a television ad with Miller’s rage-contorted face on one side and some excerpts from his speech on the other.

Miller: "Motivated more by partisan politics than by national security, today’s Democratic leaders see America as an occupier, not a liberator. And nothing makes this Marine madder than someone calling American troops occupiers rather than liberators." Narrator: On several occasions President Bush has referred to our troops in Iraq as part of an occupation force. Yet he allowed Zell Miller to attack John Kerry for using precisely the same terminology.

Miller: "Listing all the weapon systems that Senator Kerry tried his best to shut down sounds like an auctioneer selling off our national security, but Americans need to know the facts.... This is the man who wants to be the commander-in-chief of our US armed forces? US forces armed with what? Spitballs?" Narrator: At the end of the Cold War, Dick Cheney — then the secretary of defense — proposed shutting down a wide range of unneeded weapons systems. Kerry agreed with Cheney. Yet Cheney allowed Zell Miller to attack John Kerry for reasons he knows are false. And here’s something else that Zell Miller left out: John Kerry voted in favor of the Pentagon budget for 16 of the 19 years he has served in the US Senate. George Bush and Dick Cheney ought to be ashamed.

More than a few commentators have compared Miller’s bizarre outburst to Pat Buchanan’s "culture war" speech at the 1992 Republican convention, which may have helped lead to George H.W. Bush’s re-election defeat. But Miller’s speech will be quickly forgotten unless the Kerry campaign drives home the message every day. To return to Goldman’s point: the news media are not going to do it, so it’s up to Kerry.

• It’s competence, not ideology. This was Michael Dukakis’s famous formulation in his 1988 acceptance speech, and anything uttered by Dukakis is today treated like pure political poison. Yet Democrats forget that Dukakis’s technocratic campaign was highly regarded until the late Lee Atwater (Bush the elder’s Karl Rove) began delivering on his promise to "strip the bark off the little bastard."

To be sure, Kerry has to be careful. Unlike Bill Clinton, who was and is a centrist, Kerry is a liberal — the 11th-most-liberal member of the Senate, according to the nonpartisan National Journal. (You may have heard that he’s the most liberal. That’s another Republican-promoted distortion, based solely on Kerry’s voting record for just one year, 2003, when he missed a slew of roll calls while campaigning for president.) But liberal though Kerry may be, he is also a genuine expert on terrorism.

In his 1997 book The New War: The Web of Crime That Threatens National Security, Kerry wrote, "We cannot fight alone; we need to create a new international alliance to meet [threats], like the alliances that defeated fascism, communism, and Saddam Hussein." Sounds like something Bush should have read, doesn’t it? And in June 2002, before the war in Iraq, and before his campaign for president got under way officially, Kerry offered a detailed critique of Bush’s anti-terrorism campaign in an interview with Tim Russert, on NBC’s Meet the Press. Among other things, Kerry explained why Bush’s reliance on local forces rather than American troops to rout Osama bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders in the Tora Bora region of Afghanistan was "an enormous mistake." (See Seth Gitell’s "In the Wings," News and Features, April 4, 2003.)

Kerry has been more critical of the rationale for and execution of the war in Iraq than he has been of the war itself. Thanks to Kerry’s own tortuous rhetoric, it has been easy to lampoon him as a flip-flopper. In fact, Kerry’s view that the war might have been defensible if Bush hadn’t misled the public on Saddam Hussein’s weapons and ties to terrorism, and if the US had helped rather than impeded the UN weapons inspectors, probably mirrors a large majority of public opinion.

"[W]hen the president says we have the same position on Iraq, I have to respectfully disagree. Our differences couldn’t be plainer. And I have set them out consistently. When it comes to Iraq, it’s not that I would have done one thing differently, I would’ve done almost everything differently," Kerry said in his address to the American Legion last Wednesday.

Kerry can’t really take a strong anti-war position, since he voted to give Bush war-authorization powers in the fall of 2002. But by stressing competence over ideology, Kerry can finesse the issue while reaching out to both wings of the Democratic Party — a necessary step, according to one of Bill Clinton’s former consultants, Dick Morris. In an appearance last week on Fox News’s The O’Reilly Factor, Morris pointed to polling data showing that Republicans overwhelmingly believe the United States should stay in Iraq, and that the war is part of the struggle against terrorism. Kerry’s supporters, by contrast, are split on both matters. Thus, Morris explained of Kerry, "Every time he opens his mouth and takes a position on these issues, he alienates half his voters." By articulating a clear, detailed plan for dealing with both Iraq and Al Qaeda, Kerry might just be able to bring those halves together.