John Kerry officially announced his candidacy for President in South Carolina. Kerry posed himself in front of an aircraft carrier and constantly flouted his experience as a soldier in Vietnam.
Kerry did exactly what everyone would expect he would, attack the President and try to look like a Commander-in-Chief. Unfortunately, it’s hard to do that when he’s advocating policies that would only weaken our ability to deal with terrorist threats.
Kerry’s sputtering campaign is emblematic of the problems of the Democratic Party as a whole: they have no message. You don’t win elections by constantly saying "the other guy is bad, and I want to do something different". Kerry voted for the war, yet now he wants to attack the policy he gave the President authorization to do. It’s obvious that all Kerry’s posturing can’t keep his policies from looking like pale imitations of Howard Dean. While President Bush remains popular with the military, and his appearance on the Lincoln worked as a piece of political theater, there’s something about Kerry’s posturing in front of the Yorktown as being as ill-advised as Dukakis riding in a tank in 1998.
The Democrats want blood, and that’s all they’re fixated on. They’re making the same mistake they did in 2002 – they have no policies of their own. What would a Democrat do in the war on terror? If Bush’s foreign and domestic policies are so "irresponsible" what would be the Democratic alternative? How would they deal with the downturn in the economy? Do they seriously think that raising taxes, lowering productivity, and harming American workers through confiscatory taxation and more dangerous and risky socialist policy will help the US economy?
Such thoughts don’t even matter. The Democrats don’t have a plan other than hatred of Bush. Blind hatred and childish partisanship doesn’t win elections, it didn’t for the GOP in 1996, it didn’t work for the Democrats in 2002, and the arrogant and childish attitude of the Democrats isn’t going to lead to victory in 2004 either.
“And here on the homefront, every investigation, every commission, every piece of evidence we have tells us that this president has failed to make us as safe as we should be.”
This from a man who went on the Senate floor some years back to pound the Regan/Bush CIA and to question the usefulness of the CIA in general.
Kerry certainly exemplifies the blandness of the current group of Democratic nominees. The only one of the nine who strikes me as someone who could handily trounce Bush is John Edwards, whose candidacy has not caught on in the least. Edwards is running boatloads of TV ads in Iowa now, which will probably help him, but I have a sinking feeling that Edwards is about to have a sinking feeling. I have a hard time believing that Howard Dean would be electable unless the universally bottomless Bush spiral continues at its ruinous pace, which it may well. Nonetheless, I’d give Dean a better chance at the White House than the person the Dems foolishly believe is their savior–Hillary Clinton.
The Dems lack direction, but few parties taking on an incumbent President hype specifics in the primary season. If the Democratic solutions are as thinly outlined next Labor Day as they are this Labor Day, then they have a serious problem. One item on that agenda which will be more obvious with each passing day is the desperate need to repeal most or all of the Bush tax cuts. It’s plausible that repealing those tax cuts will trigger some of the consequences you suggested, but the alternative of letting the tax cuts stand while presiding over disastrous budget deficits of 7-8 percent of GDP (a scenario that looks nearly inevitable) will trigger much graver consequences, especially long-term.