Both Gephardt and Kerry have started using the same strategy. They both keep saying in various ways that voters should ask if they feel safer today than they did four years ago. In many respects this is a very unserious question. If you asked voters if they felt safer after Pearl Harbor they’d say no. That hardly means FDR was to blame (though I know some do. I’m talking politics here). Similarly, President Bush can claim credit for discarding the phoney peace of the Clinton years in order to assure long term safety even at the cost of short term instability.

Regardless, this line may sound Reaganesque, but it’s actually from the Kennedy playbook. Gephardt and Kerry are trying to sound tougher than Bush in much the same way Kennedy decried the fake “missile gap.”

There are some important differences and those differences illuminate why the strategy will fail. First of all, as I mentioned above, there’s the bogus nature of the argument itself. Second, Bush is no Eisenhower. He’s far more like Kennedy in terms of his muscular liberal internationalism (for want of a better term) than anybody the Democrats have. Third, this strategy is weighted down by cynicism. Kerry and Gephardt both voted to support Bush pretty much every time they had the opportunity. But they never, ever, claimed they were more hawkish than Bush and never attempted to be more assertive than him.

Indeed, if you go by Harold Meyerson’s telling in today’s Washington Post Gephardt agreed to support the war for narrow partisan reasons. If that’s true — and Meyerson should know — one might ask why Bush is denounced by folks like Begala, Krugman and McAuliffe as a Hitler-like aggressor who went to war to distract from domestic problems while Gephardt gets a free pass for endorsing a war (and giving it all the bipartisan cover it needed) simply so he could focus on domestic issues.