Kerry Spot    [ jim geraghty reporting ]
[ kerry spot home | archives | email ]

Kerry at the University of South Florida, June 2, 2004.

Today (Thursday) John Kerry delivers a speech on "Strengthening Our Military to Meet New Threats" at the Harry S. Truman Library. It's another stop on Kerry's national-security tour of the past week, and another step in his campaign to convince voters he can handle defense and terror issues better than President Bush.

But Kerry's policy addresses have generated zero buzz and garnered little beyond perfunctory news coverage, mostly because they're so vague as to be indistinguishable from Bush policies, or propose only minor changes from current actions. Kerry's called for building a "coalition of the able" to fight terrorism. He's promised a new White House position to focus on securing nuclear materials overseas. He wants speedier drug and vaccine development. Today Kerry is expected to make the shocking announcement that, "We must reform training and update the way we structure our armed forces — for example, with special forces designed to strike terrorists in their sanctuaries, and with national guard and reserve units retooled to meet the requirements of homeland defense."

Special forces designed to strike terrorists in their sanctuaries? Certainly the Bush administration never would have thought of that.

The end result is that Kerry has ended up selling himself as what John Hillen, director of the Program on National Security at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, calls, "Bush Lite...a set of light, stylistic differences."

RADICAL DISAPPOINTMENT

"He has become establishment, cautious and self-protective, in contrast to his forthright youth," laments Thomas. "During the primary season, some anti-war Democrats taunted Kerry and accused him of giving Bush a blank check to wage war. Indeed, Kerry's foreign policy is hardly distinguishable from Bush. After 18 comfortable years in the Senate, Kerry has lost the persona that had set him apart back in the Vietnam era.

On the Middle East, Kerry is simply a "me too" echo of Bush when it comes to endorsing Israel's illegal land grab on the Palestinian-occupied West Bank. Kerry also has yet to make a strong clear difference with Bush on domestic issues."

Syndicated columnist Ruben Navarrette Jr. echoes the "selling out to the man" theme.

"Much of what Kerry is saying about the need to maintain a united front against terrorists and do 'whatever is necessary' to prevent another attack on this country — while reasonable — only serves to reinforce the similarities between the two men," writes Navarrette. "Kerry can't help it. He's not the outsider he was 30 years ago, when he protested against the Vietnam War. Nowadays, he's too much a part of the political establishment to feel comfortable in challenging it — even when the establishment needs to be challenged."

David E. Sanger and Jodi Wilgoren of the New York Times write that, "One of the key complaints about the Kerry campaign among Democrats is that his approach to major foreign policy issues is too similar in substance to Bush's, even if he promises a new style that emphasizes alliance-building."

"He's not braking any new ground, or heading in any new direction," Gary Schmitt, executive director of Project for a New American Century, tells NRO. "It's much more of an echo of the key themes of Bush's own foreign policy."

WELL, DUH

For example, after Kerry promised to "elevate non-proliferation to the top of the global agenda," the Bush campaign pointed to the June 2003 G-8 Declaration on Nonproliferation. It states, "We recognize that the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and their means of delivery poses a growing danger to us all. Together with the spread of international terrorism, it is the pre-eminent threat to international security."

"John Kerry's embrace of nonproliferation goals and objectives already laid out by President Bush is a welcome step, but his failure to accept the success of negotiations with Libya and his criticism of a multilateral approach to confront the threat from North Korea demonstrate that John Kerry can't help but play politics with national security," says Steve Schmidt, a spokesman for the Bush campaign.

Wednesday, when Kerry urged for more funding for defense against bioweapons, Schmidt pointed out, "Kerry's speech was more me-tooism and ignored the reality that funding for biodefense has increased 1,600 percent since President Bush took office."

There are other examples. A Kerry statement on May 28 reiterated a call to temporarily increase the army by about 40,000 active-duty Army troops; the Pentagon had already boosted its numbers by 30,000 troops above its congressionally approved limit of 482,000 in January. Kerry has repeatedly said Iraq must become a NATO mission, but NATO is providing support for the Polish-led multinational division in Iraq. As NATO Secretary General Lord Robertson spelled out, "11 out of the 19 military members of NATO have got troops either committed to Iraq or already in Iraq, six out of the seven new countries that will join NATO next year have got troops committed to Iraq, and I think it is six out of the ten partner nations of NATO and the partnership for peace are also there."

Some of Kerry's lack of distinction from Bush is a bow to reality. First, unlike, say, taxation, where each party is working towards opposite goals, neither party is pro-terrorism or pro-nuclear-material-smuggling. So even Kerry wouldn't advocate negotiating with al Qaeda or unilateral disarmament of the U.S. military. Second, no matter what policies Kerry may want in his heart, Helen Thomas's preferred policies, like withdrawing all U.S. troops from Iraq by January (a.k.a. retreating and capitulating to a punk like Sadr) are political losers. So Kerry can't draw that kind of obvious distinction.

Third, if there were obvious, cost-efficient, effective national-security solutions out there, Bush and company would be using them by now. If all it took to stop the smuggling of nuclear material was a new White House position dealing with it, Bush would have appointed twelve.

Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, says that Kerry's recent turn for the boring and vague is a step to the political center and away from the angry Howard Dean liberalism he embraced in the primaries.

"In the long term, a Kerry administration would be not that radically different from the Bush administration," Boot said. "Anyone expecting a different set of core tenets of American foreign policy is going to be inevitably disappointed."