Take Marjorie Williams, in yesterday's WaPo. Williams concedes her anti-Bush bias in the second sentence. Yet the article, called "Win One for the Flipper," could not be more scathing:
Bay State political junkies trade their favorite Kerry flip-flops like baseball cards. Bush is already having fun with Kerry's zigzags of the past three years alone: Kerry voted for so many of Bush's major initiatives that in order to disown them now he can only argue that they were wrongly or dishonestly "implemented." This amounts to a confession that his opponent made a chump of him for the past three years.Well, yes, Marjorie, though Kerry's made it awful easy. Williams is particularly annoyed by Kerry's gay marriage position. Er, a, positions:
I finally lost my grip, though, when I opened my newspaper a few days ago to read of Kerry's latest lunge in the direction of some politically feasible position on gay marriage. In general, Kerry, like most Democrats, has taken shelter in the mantra that (a) it's a matter that should be decided in the states, and (b) civil unions are the acceptable way to go about conferring equal rights on gays; marriage itself is off the table. "I believe marriage is between a man and a woman," Democrats say, as if that took care of the matter. . . .Conservatives certainty wouldn't dispute a word of Williams' conclusion:
But Kerry was managing this footwork just fine until Feb. 4, when the Supreme Court of Massachusetts interpreted the state's constitution to require the option of gay marriage. Kerry responded by endorsing an amendment to the state's constitution that would forbid gay marriage but allow civil union. . .
But never mind. On Feb. 27, Kerry quietly told a group of unhappy gay donors that he would work to confer full federal benefits, including Social Security survivor benefits, the right to file taxes jointly, and more than a thousand others, on gay couples joined by any state-sanctioned union -- which would of course include marriage. So while wishing to forbid gay marriage in his own state, he is promising to reward it in others.
To watch Kerry floundering in the impossible contradictions [on these issues] is to see starkly how little he is guided by core principle -- or even by a consistently wise sense of where his political interests lie. To respond to every unpleasant political stimulus that presents itself is to throw away the chance to make even an expedient long-term commitment to something.Though delicious and well-reasoned, Williams' article wasn't even the best liberal Kerry-bashing of the weekend. That honor belongs to Maureen Dowd's column in Sunday's NY Times. Apparently, MoDo recently interviewed candidate Kerry--which makes President Bush look even better:
In what may be an interesting harbinger for their debates, W. raced through his whole interview in the same time Mr. Kerry took to answer the first question about his favorite movie. After he had roamed through 37 movies, ranging from his "Fellini stage" to his Adam Sandler period, from "National Velvet" to "The Deer Hunter" to "Men in Black," Mr. Kerry's aides began to hover.And I've never seen Dowd nastier than this:
Still showing his phantom Irish side, he pronounced Leon Uris's "Trinity" his favorite novel, and said he once explored making it into a movie. Then he tacked on Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer and the Hardy Boys -- "all those good dudes." Then, remembering he's in an alpha race, he added portentously: "We all were affected by Hemingway."So much indecision about authors--imagine how long Kerry requires to react to a genuine threat to America?
Finally, there's former and still quasi-liberal Andrew Sullivan. He's no fan of President Bush. But Sullivan's frustrated by Kerry's addiction to pandering every voter and the policy flip-flops that follow:
Over the many years that John Kerry has been in the United States senate, the Democrat from Massachusetts has accumulated an astonishing ability to have been on every side of most issues. There's a polite way of saying this, of course. The Washington Post recently reported that "Kerry's past support for policies he now condemns is complicating his run for the White House, strategists from both parties say, and could prove problematic." Or here's how the editors of the New York Times expressed it: "What his critics see as an inability to take strong, clear positions seems to us to reflect his appreciation that life is not simple." Well, life isn't simple. But it doesn't have to be as subtly, preternaturally, systematically complex as John Kerry makes it out to be.According to Sullivan, there only principle behind Kerry's shifts is the lack of principle:
People who have been in public life a long time are allowed, of course, to change their minds, to move when new facts emerge or new arguments persuade them. And it is one of George W. Bush's weaknesses that he doesn't seem able to adjust his convictions in the face of empirical evidence that they might need adjusting, changing or fixing. But Kerry goes further than most. And almost all of his adjustments have been in order to serve his immediate political interests rather than to stand up for principle.Finally, Sullivan supplies additional anecdotes confirming MoDo--that Kerry has no ability to simplify. Such as this example, from the February 25th Boston Globe coverage of a campaign stop in Ohio:
Kerry led a question-and-answer forum with workers at a Youngstown manufacturing plant, where the senator drew polite applause at points but also some lengthy silences. He answered seven questions over 27 minutes; three of his answers lasted more than five minutes apiece.I'm grateful our current President can manage national security issues without days of dithering. I'm thankful the country's run by someone who doesn't have to recall 37 movies to formulate one favorite. I'm thrilled decisionmaking doesn't drag from endless, Clintonian, "on the other hand" debates.
And I'm scared to death what could happen to America were that to change.
