I was just reading Charles Krauthammer’s excellent column on Kerry and something occurred to me. First, here’s the part about Kerry on Imus that got me thinking:

When Don Imus asked him this week, “Do you think there are any circumstances we should have gone to war in Iraq, any?” Kerry responded: “Not under the current circumstances, no. There are none that I see. I voted based on weapons of mass destruction. The president distorted that.” But just last month he said that even if he had known then what he knows now, he would have voted for the war resolution.

Me again:Now, Krauthammer’s interpretation is that Kerry’s simply an ever shifting flip-flopper who takes whatever position he thinks is politically warranted at the moment. Fair enough. Indeed, I think this is the most plausible and likely interpretation.

But there’s another one. This one takes Kerry at face value. What if Kerry’s positions are constantly shifting not because of the polls but because of the changing events in Iraq? What if he’s the kind of guy — and I think we’ve all met them — who greets every setback with the declaration “This was a stupid idea to begin with!” but who greets every triumph by saying “I knew this was a great idea from the get-go!”

In other words, maybe Kerry constantly plays the movie backwards judging past decisions by the here-and-now rather than what’s in the long term. I think this is quite possible — in part because it doesn’t contradict interpretation number 1. Kerry’s “vision” is profoundly stunted. His accomplishments in the Senate can be found with a microscope and tweezers. Maybe it’s because he lacks the kind of imagination which can comprehend a trendline that moves in more than one direction. Things are going bad now, they must always be bad. Things are going good now, always good. And so on. In this scenario what he calls “nuance” is actually an acute inability to grasp that today’s headlines do not automatically corrupt yesterday’s decisions or tomorrow’s goals. If I’m right, this strikes me as the worst possible characteristic of a Commander-in-Chief.

Anyway, I think I’m on to something. But I’ll keep pondering.