It's The War, Stupid!

The left-wing media is all but screaming at John Kerry to get tougher on Bush.

"Come On, Kerry, Drop The Kid Gloves On Iraq" shouts a headline from the International Herald Tribune. The story includes this little gem:

When a New York Times reporter asked Bush about North Korea, "he just opened his palms and shrugged."

The Village Voice looks at a hard-hitting new TV ad from a 9/11 widow and urges Kerry to get similarly aggressive on Iraq. The Voice says Kerry should remind voters about Bin Laden:

"the Bush convention—with a hundred references in major speeches to terror and 69 to Iraq or Hussein—mentioned Osama just once, and then only to blame him on Bill Clinton.""

The Voice does not contemplate the possibility that Bush could be hiding bin Laden in some foreign hole, just waiting for such an opening.

The LA Times lead is headed "If Only Kerry Were From The Bronx".

A Guardian hand-picks a variety of analyst comments, headlining with one which says Kerry comes across as "either unprincipled or indecisive".

The New York Times says Preventative War Is a Failed Doctrine and Kerry should be calling for a return to tradional foreign policy, albeit with a new emphasis on fighting terrorism.

Joe Klein at TIME magazine start his piece with the wonderfully timely words, "A long time ago last week,..." and says Bush seems to have the faith of his convictions, however misguided they may be, while Kerry seems prepared to do or say whatever it takes to win.

"Democrats were perplexed, depressed and awestruck. How could Cheney get away with saying, in effect, that a vote for Kerry was a vote for terrorism? More to the point, how could Bush get away with, well, everything: a misspent youth, a lifetime of insider trading on the family name, a misfought war, a misleading inference that the invasion of Iraq had some vague relevance to 9/11, a presidency marked by rampant corporate cronyism at home and abroad? "If we can't beat this guy, with this record ..." a prominent Democrat said to me. He was unable to finish the sentence."

But for me the best advice comes from a Paul Krugman column, reprinted in the Taipei Times:

"When war psychology takes hold, the public believes, temporarily, in a "mythic reality" in which our nation is purely good, our enemies are purely evil, and anyone who isn't our ally is our enemy... To win, the Kerry campaign has to convince a significant number of voters that the self-proclaimed "war president" isn't an effective war leader -- he only plays one on TV. This charge has the virtue of being true."