Comparing presidential elections to each other is a tricky business. Four years is just long enough to push half-willed campaign promises, near-slanderous commercials and sound-byte debates out of even an informed voter’s memory.
But this problem of comparative electoral judgments is even muddier for voters as young as myself, who generally lacked political perspective for most of the elections for which they’ve been alive. Even after taking account of this uneven appreciation for politics, though, I’m willing to call this year’s presidential campaign, without question, the most frustrating contest in memory.
Gobbledygook about Senate votes and dubious analyses of employment numbers clog the public’s consciousness, while the major candidates’ positions on the economy, Iraq and the war on terror (whatever that means now) are shapeless, impractical or both. And it’s not even October yet.
Both parties deserve blame for the intellectually bankrupt kabuki of Swift boats and National Guard service that is presidential electoral politics 2004. But Democratic strategists and their Republican counterparts are culpable for different reasons.
In a gambit demanding more moxie than seems tenable in a presidential race, Republican strategists followed inquiries into President Bush’s spotty National Guard service with criticism of Sen. John Kerry’s own service from the era. Never mind that Kerry’s superiors thought his service merited Bronze and Silver stars, which are awarded respectively for heroic or meritorious achievement or service and gallantry in action against an enemy of the United States. (Incidentally, Kerry also received three Purple Hearts.)
Really, it’s unclear how relevant any of that should be. How much one’s conduct three decades ago define one’s present character is debatable, and drawing conclusions about likely presidential policy from what someone did in 1972 is tenuous at best. (In the most compelling argument for a relevant connection between the candidates’ pasts and presents that I’ve read, Slate Magazine’s William Saletan suggested in a Sept. 16 piece that Bush’s Vietnam-era service is relevant because of his present day “abuse” of the Guard. That’s fine, but military policy should be defined on the terms of ensuring domestic tranquility and providing for the common defense, not on those of the personal service histories of its executors.)
In any case, for reasons unclear — unless they’re those of irrelevance as described above, which are probably too far above modern electoral politics to be practical — Kerry’s softball campaign has largely avoided firing back about the comparison, squandering what looks like a forensic freebie of elephantine proportions.
And such is Kerry’s worse electoral folly to date: An evident inability to capitalize on key Bush campaign (and policy) shortcomings. The most potent way to counter Bush’s unduly optimistic and largely untenable present plan for Iraq is, of course, offering a more practical, cogent course. (For those who disagree with my prognosis of the Bush administration’s Iraqi fortunes, consider both the shortcomings of the plan to date and the administration’s unwillingness to curb them to practicality.)
Kerry’s problem isn’t that America likes the status quo too much to listen: According to a Democracy Corps poll taken Sept. 19-21, only 43 percent of likely voters think that the nation is headed in the right direction. Fifty-two percent said it was on the wrong track.
Kerry’s problem is the same one that I suggested plagued the Democratic Party’s message in this space last fall (“Democrats’ demise;” ODE; Nov. 7, 2003): His talk about Iraq and the war on terror so far seems vague, disjointed or just noncommittal. In fact, Kerry’s views on Iraq are not contradictory, as critics would like to suggest, but they are nuanced, and they haven’t yet been digestibly explained. And, for better or worse, casual issue voters pick proposals on gut reaction and quick comprehensibility, not more complex analyses they don’t have time for.
Kerry’s first chance in some time to parse more clearly his views on Iraq and the war on terror to a large audience is tonight’s presidential debate, the first of three planned.
In a race as close as this — a recent vote projection gave Bush 51.1 percent and Kerry 47.1 percent of the popular vote — every turn of phrase counts. If Kerry wants to close the gap, he’ll need to pick words that are clearer than the jumble he’s offered so far.
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