Vietnam Won't Save John Kerry

George Bush has emerged from the New York convention with a 10 or 11 point lead over John Kerry, depending who is counting. Democrats can reassure themselves that there are still nearly two months to go in this election. But given how badly Kerry has used the nearly seven months since he locked up the Democratic nomination, there is little reason to expect that he will use the next 60 days more wisely.

Kerry was caught off-guard by the success of Howard Dean's insurgency in December, 2003. Up until that point, Kerry had been campaigning as a Clinton-style centrist on economics and a moderate hawk on the war. But Dean's surge panicked Kerry into chasing the anti-war vote much further left than Kerry had ever intended to go. It was then that Kerry cast those votes against the US$87-billion for operations in Afghanistan and Iraq -- votes that the Republicans are using now to argue that Kerry voted to deny U.S. forces body armour and ammunition.

Having beaten Dean, Kerry turned rightward again. In March and April, he told journalists that he was a "pro-war" candidate -- that he disagreed with the Bush administration's allegedly clumsy execution of the war on terror and the campaign in Iraq, but that he supported both. It was during this stage that he announced that he would send more troops to Iraq if needed to prevail.

By summer, however, the polls were suggesting that the public was souring on Iraq. Kerry had overshot again -- this time, on the right. So he cancelled the promise to send more troops to Iraq (now he said he had meant only to promise to add more troops to the active strength of the armed forces) and began talking instead of withdrawing troops.

Convinced that Iraq was the only issue in the election, Kerry planned a convention that slighted domestic issues like jobs and health care and that showcased him as an experienced war leader who could save the country from foreign-policy disaster: exactly the approach that had worked for Dwight Eisenhower in 1952. His acceptance speech told the story of a man of war who had the record and strength to secure the peace. He told the delegates that he was born in Colorado; that his father was an Air Force test pilot and that his mother was a Girl Guide leader; that he had volunteered for Vietnam and returned home to prosecute criminals; that he had devoted himself in the Senate to national security and intelligence issues.

None of this was false exactly, but it left behind a seriously misleading impression. Kerry is not a Westerner, nor is he the product of a middle-class military family: His father was a diplomat who carefully concealed his Jewish origins; his mother descended from one of Boston's most aristocratic clans. Kerry came to national fame not as a war hero but as a war protestor -- and though he certainly worked hard on national security issues, he did so as consistently the most dovish member of the U.S. Senate.

For Kerry to stake a claim to the presidency on his record as a warrior is akin to Bill Clinton staking his claim to the job on his excellence as a family man. And even if every word of the story had been precisely true, it still would have availed Kerry little. John McCain is an undoubted Vietnam hero, but he's not president; Bob Kerrey lost a leg and gained the Medal of Honor in Vietnam, but Bill Clinton beat him all the same for the Democratic nomination in 1992.

Voters pick presidents for their strategic leadership, not their personal valour. Dwight Eisenhower could campaign as the architect of the victory in Europe, but if John F. Kennedy had offered only the story of his heroism aboard PT-109, he would have lost to Richard Nixon in 1960.

And as John Kerry's personal story has unravelled, voters have been left with a strong impression that Kerry had attempted to deceive them. He should have told them about his days as a protestor -- and told them too how he had grown and changed in the three decades since he compared U.S. forces to the horde of Ghengis Khan. He should have assured them that it was not mere opportunism that accounted for his vote in favour of the Iraq War in 2002 after he had voted against the UN-approved Gulf War in 1990.

But because he never understood how far his own past career had taken him from the American mainstream, he never believed that any explanation was necessary. And because he prized himself so highly, he could never accept that any explanation was due.

Will Kerry suddenly improve as a candidate? People do change in emergencies. But in this emergency Kerry seems again to be drawing the wrong lessons. He's about to go viciously on the attack against the military records of George Bush and Dick Cheney. "Two tours of duty beats five deferments": that was his theme at his midnight rally in Ohio last week. But Kerry has to beat Bush, not Cheney, and you can't beat Bush by accusing him of having idled away his early life -- Bush admits it himself. The dramatic event in Bush's life is his conversion in his early 40s, and the harder you slam him for misspending his 20s, the more impressive that conversion becomes.

Terrorists could blow up a barracks in Iraq or a plane over Chicago; the stock market could crash and real estate prices could fall. But nothing short of such a negative miracle will save Kerry. Bush can still lose, but it's too late for Kerry to win.