Link history: Blogger Dan Drezner says he’s worried about Kerry’s 30 year record. Blogger Kevin Drum tries to explain why he shouldn’t. Blogger Andrew Sullivan basically agrees with Drum. Here’s Drum:

[O]bsessing over Kerry’s entire 30-year public history is probably unproductive. After all, before 9/11 George Bush and his advisors had little concern for terrorism and expressed frequent contempt for things like nation building and democracy promotion. Does that affect how we feel about Bush today?
It shouldn’t, because we accept that 9/11 fundamentally changed his view of the world. We judge Bush by how he’s reacted after 9/11, not by his advisors’ long records before taking office — and I’d argue that we should do the same with Kerry rather than raking over nuclear freeze minutiae and Gulf War votes from over a decade ago. Obviously Kerry’s past illuminates his character to some degree, but a lot changed on 9/11 and I suspect that ancient history is a poor guide to his view of how to react to the post-9/11 world.

Me: This is a good point as far as it goes, but it’s a better debater’s point.

First of all, ignoring Kerry’s pre-9/11 record only makes sense in this analysis if there’s overwhelming evidence that Kerry’s changed his worldview since 9/11. I’ve seen no such evidence. He ran on his Vietnam record before 9/11, he runs on it now. He’s offered no apologies nor revealing introspection for his anti-war efforts and his opposition to the Reagan administration. He surrounds himself with Clintonian foreign policy advisors and others to their left. He touts his decidedly pre-9/11 book on global crime as a training manual for post 9/11 world in which hunting terrorists is a “law enforcement issue” and terrorism is something he hopes to get to the nuisance level. His pre-9/11 views on diplomacy, defense and intelligence don’t really seem to have gone away — or gone away for long. He invokes the same idiotic story about De Galle trusting the United States, he worships the UN, he voted against the $87 billion for ever-changing reasons, but none of them seem to be the result of an epiphany about the dangers of the 9/11 world. To this day the only use of force he’s said wouldn’t be subject to a global test and that he could be counted upon to administer would be a response to an attack. Woop-dee-frickin’ doo.

During the primaries, when asked if he’d call himself a war president the way Bush does, he responded: “I’d see myself first of all as a jobs president, as a health care president, as an education president and also an environmental president.”

This is a man who’s changed because of 9/11? In fact, I thought Kerry’s appeal to folks like Sullivan and Mickey Kaus was that he’d offer a “resting period” after all of Bush’s big changes.

Second, as for Bush’s change of heart since 9/11, I think he certainly had one. He campaigned on the promise of a “humble” foreign policy after all. Sullivan writes: “Bush in 2000 was adamantly against nation-building, paid little attention to terrorism as a threat, and wanted to spend less on the military than Gore. Should he be held to account for that today? Not really. So why should Kerry?”

That’s all fair to a point. But in 2000, the world did seem a different place and Bush’s response to 9/11 shows a change of heart while, at best, Kerry’s show a change of tactics.

Still, if someone had told me that Bush had had Kerry’s positions on the Cold War during that struggle I would have been very concerned. Moreover, if Bush had been anywhere near as wrong as Kerry was on the Cold War, Bush wouldn’t have gotten the nomination. People forget now, but Tom Ridge probably lost the VP nomination in 2000 because of conservative opposition to his squishiness on foreign policy in the 1980s (thanks to John Miller’s reporting, if I recall).

The most telling thing about this whole line of argument is how much it reveals John Kerry’s record is dead weight. There’s a reason Kerry focused on Vietnam at his convention, a reason bolstered by 20 years of political reporting in his home state and in Washington: Kerry’s done almost nothing to be proud of in two decades of work in the Senate. With the exception of the reconciliation with Vietnam, what is there? Why has the Democratic Party burped up one of the least qualified men in its party to deal with the greatest threat to the United States since the Cold War? The urge to say Kerry’s a “new man” is a direct response to the inconvenient fact that the old man was so worthless.