Democratic Party chiefs must have been relieved yesterday that their presidential candidate John Kerry came over well in the first of his three televised debates with President Bush. Given Kerry’s lackluster performance in the campaign thus far and his trailing in the opinion polls, the evening was all his to lose. In the event he appeared trenchant and decisive and it took a while for Bush to stop looking annoyed by his rival’s criticism and hit his folksy regular-guy stride.
The main issue in this hugely stage-managed event was Iraq and the extent to which the Bush administration’s aggressive policy had actually made Americans safer from the threat of global terrorism. Kerry scored several good points as he drove home the message that far from dealing a body blow to Al-Qaeda, the Iraq invasion had given the terrorists a new battle field and a cause around which to muster anti-American support. Kerry also made an issue of Bush’s failure to destroy Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan when his forces were surrounded after the invasion. By sending in Afghan fighters, whose allegiance was not clear, Washington may well have let their No, 1 enemy escape.
To those of us living next door to the disastrous consequences of the Bush administration’s policies, these are questions of pressing importance. However, to the two candidates’ intended audience of 50 million American voters, they have a very different meaning. The extraordinary series of Bush blunders in Afghanistan and Iraq matter to Kerry only in so far as they can prove to the voters that the present US commander in chief is no longer fit to hold office. However, Kerry’s job has been made the harder because like most other Americans caught up in the agony and anger post Sept.11, he was originally a hawkish supporter of the ouster of Saddam.
Because most Americans know little of the rest of the world their perception of the turmoil beyond their borders is black and white. The appeal for their vote must therefore be couched in simple terms. Kerry tried this by saying that Americans had borne 90 percent of the cost and 90 percent of the casualties, which caused Bush to retort that this was to play down the contribution of Washington’s allies. Kerry maintained that the $200 billion bill so far could have gone on domestic health care spending.
This ploy however exposes a conundrum. Americans have been told they are in clear and present danger and must therefore lead the war against global terror which so threatens them. Their instincts, however, as the body bags continue to fly home from Baghdad and the bill rises steeply along with the turbulence in Iraq, are to reject a world that for its part seems intent upon rejecting the crystal clear “rightness” of US values and assistance. The challenge for John Kerry is to build a sensible electoral offer based on these contradictory instincts of voters. On Thursday he was picking the easy fruit, saying that the president had done wrong. Now if he can, he must reach higher and tell Americans what exactly he will do differently.
