Fulton, Missouri
AS JOHN KERRY was getting pummeled last week for his inconsistent answers on ribbons, medals, or whatever the things are called today–in the process turning a one-day story into a one-week story–the Bush campaign continued its precise assault on his national security record in the Senate. The centerpiece of that attack was an address here April 26 by Vice President Dick Cheney. In the back-and-forth of a close campaign, Cheney’s speech was an important contribution to the debate. It generated news coverage for three days and helped ensure that Kerry spent much of the week playing defense.
But the speech–delivered six months before the election, on what will surely be the campaign’s most important issue–was more than a news-cycle win. Campaign and administration sources say it is a blueprint for how the Bush-Cheney campaign will use national security in its effort to win reelection and trap John Kerry in a box of his own making.
Cheney’s argument last week–delivered in a gymnasium at Westminster College, the site of Winston Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech–was substantively much the same as one he made in a March address at the Ronald Reagan library in California. George W. Bush, like Reagan and Churchill before him, is a bold statesman leading his nation in an existential fight against evil. Churchill, said Cheney, provides a model for “the kind of leadership required to defend freedom in our time.”
Cheney urged continuing Bush policies on national security. He devoted the first half of his speech to the nature of the threat and the administration’s aggressive response to it. On September 11, he said, “we awakened to dangers even more lethal–the possibility that terrorists could gain chemical, biological, or even nuclear weapons from outlaw regimes and turn those weapons against the United States. We came to understand that for all the destruction and grief we saw that day, September 11 gave only the merest glimpse of the threat that international terrorism poses to this and other nations.”
The Bush administration, Cheney continued, is “taking the fight directly to the enemy.” President Bush is “calm and deliberate, comfortable with responsibility, consistent in his objectives, and resolute in his actions. These times have tested the character of our nation, and they have tested the character of our nation’s leader.” It won’t surprise anyone to learn that Cheney thinks his boss passed the test.
The second half of the speech was a deconstruction of Kerry’s congressional record on national security, which, Cheney said, “raises some important questions.” Using Kerry’s own words, the vice president painted the Massachusetts senator as a vacillating politician whose uncertainty makes him unfit to lead in difficult times.
Why does Kerry now praise the international effort in the first Gulf War as a “strong coalition,” when at the time he dismissed the participants as “shadow battlefield allies who barely carry a burden”? Why did Kerry advocate tough action against Saddam Hussein under President Clinton, with or without allies, but want President Bush to seek additional U.N. approval? Why did Kerry vote in favor of the Patriot Act only to denounce it later?
Cheney says that all of this, coupled with Kerry’s “deeply irresponsible” proposed cuts to defense and intelligence, raises “serious doubts” about his “understanding of the broader struggle against terror.”
The Bush campaign’s two-part argument on national security has Kerry in a tough spot. The first part: George W. Bush’s policies have made America safer. And the second: John Kerry is a weak, unsteady leader who does not know how to fight terrorists. Because he initially supported so many post-9/11 Bush administration policies, especially the war in Iraq, Kerry will have a tough time challenging the first contention without confirming the second.
I asked Ken Mehlman about all of this last week. He’s the campaign manager for Bush’s reelection effort and has been on the job since August 2003. A Harvard-trained lawyer and longtime deputy to Karl Rove, the 37-year-old Mehlman has a reputation as one of the capital’s brightest political thinkers.
His eighth floor office in the nondescript Arlington, Virginia, building that houses the Bush-Cheney campaign offers a fantastic view of the Washington Monument and the Capitol. Mehlman speaks at perhaps twice the volume of a normal conversation, making his denunciations of Kerry seem even more forceful.
“Senator Kerry’s biggest problem is that on the critical questions on the war on terror, he’s been wrong,” says Mehlman. “Kerry’s argument that fighting terrorism is primarily a law enforcement and intelligence function reflects his pre-9/11 worldview. I think his fundamental problem is that at a time when Americans recognize a very serious threat, Senator Kerry has not. And what’s damaging is that’s consistent with his voting record. What’s most problematic for a candidate is when a wrong position is consistent with his overall record.”
Mehlman, like Cheney, emphasizes the similarities between the war on terror and the Cold War. He makes this point several times, in rapid succession, his voice rising with each accusation.
“At the height of the Cold War, Senator Kerry also failed to see the nature of the real threat we faced.” And then: “If you look back on the 19 years of Senator Kerry’s career, when America faced two very large, existential threats, he made the wrong judgment about the nature of those threats and therefore had the wrong policy conclusions.” And again: “At the height of the Cold War and at the height of the war on terror, he said we need to cut our defense and cut our intelligence. I think that’s his fundamental problem.”
The politics are simple. The Cold War united the Republican base for more than 40 years. Whatever their differences on Roe v. Wade or prayer in schools, social conservatives and economic conservatives shared a belief in the importance of confronting communism. The Bush campaign hopes the war on terror will have the same effect today. And polls indicate solid Republican support for the war in Iraq, specifically, as well as for the broader campaign. “We have Reagan-era levels of support among our base,” says Mehlman.
Democrats, by contrast, are divided, particularly on the question of Iraq. Kerry faces the difficult task of appealing to both the large swath of Democratic voters passionately opposed to that war–the voters Howard Dean energized in his primary run and those potentially available to antiwar candidate Ralph Nader–and more moderate Democrats. That conundrum hit him squarely at a rally last Wednesday in Toledo, when a woman in the audience accused the Bush administration of murdering Iraqi children and waging the war in Iraq “for the oil and for Cheney, for his business over there.” The crowd applauded, and Kerry gingerly sidestepped at least one of the accusations, saying he couldn’t support her claim that the war was for oil. “I understand where you are coming from, ma’am,” he responded. “I really sympathize with the anger you feel. I’ll tell you this: If you’ll trust me with the presidency of the United States, I will pursue a policy that I know can get our troops down in number, reduced, out of Iraq.”
So Kerry muddles on. In his own speech at Westminster College on Friday, Kerry finally laid out his plan for Iraq. He vowed to internationalize the force, specifically calling on France, Germany, and Russia to participate, and proposed the appointment of a U.N. high commissioner on Iraq. The tone of the speech was good, but it was short on specifics; Kerry did not tell the audience how exactly he would win the support of those nations that opposed the war, other than to alert them to the fact that a successful Iraq was in their “self-interest.” And he failed to explain why it would be desirable to turn over all of Iraq to an organization that–as the unfolding Oil-for-Food scandal suggests–was complicit in Saddam-era corruption. These details matter. And it’s hard to imagine a union member from Toledo, Ohio, or a schoolteacher from Fulton, Missouri, getting too excited about further involvement with the U.N.
It’s probably not smart to draw broad conclusions based on audience responses to one line in a speech. Kerry, after all, got plenty of applause at Westminster. But Cheney got a standing ovation and whoops of delight from the heavily Republican crowd with this dig at Kerry’s faith in the United Nations: “The United States will never seek a permission slip to defend the security of our country.”
Stephen F. Hayes is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard.
