Varying views on Kerry's NYU speech

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

(The ABB crowd has begun to anoint John Kerry as the peace candidate. 
Don Hazen, who made a fortune in the direct mail business for leftish 
nonprofits, is unabashedly treating Kerry's NYU speech as the greatest 
thing since the Sermon on the Mount. David Corn of the Nation is more 
circumspect, but nonetheless gives Kerry far more credit than the 
delightfully acerbic Maureen Dowd of the NY Times does.)

John Kerry's Tipping Point
By Don Hazen, AlterNet. Posted September 23, 2004.

There is a growing sense that John Kerry's campaign has reached a 
tipping point. The watershed moment was a sharply worded and highly 
publicized speech attacking George Bush's policy on Iraq on Sept. 20 at 
New York University.

In his speech, Kerry said he would never have supported the invasion of 
an Iraq that didn't have weapons of mass destruction. By asserting that 
America is less safe now because Bush invaded Iraq instead of pursuing 
Osama bin laden – "We have traded a dictator for a chaos that has left 
America less secure" – Kerry is now drawing a sharp contrast with his 
opponent rather than trying to sell himself as a better version of Bush.

Suddenly, there was a sigh of relief heard round the world as Democrats 
and progressives finally got some sparkle in their eyes. Kerry was 
talking values, which in turn created greater clarity of purpose and 
momentum among his heretofore ambivalent, and carping, supporters. It 
also marked him for the first time as the anti-war candidate, clearly 
opposed to a war that a majority of Americans say has failed.

full: http://www.alternet.org/election04/19973/

===

The Nation, Sept. 23, 2004
Election Matters
Kerry's Iraq Plan
by David Corn

"This is not going to be simple," says a Kerry aide. "If you want 
simplicity, vote for Bush." As another Kerry adviser puts it, "There's a 
chance Kerry's approach won't work and will be a fiasco, and we will end 
up staying in for a year or so longer than we should have." In that 
case, Kerry--who as an antiwar leader in the 1970s once famously said, 
"How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"--will 
have done just that. But Kerry's current plan--or intention--is to ask 
US troops and other nations to confront, not run from, Bush's mistake in 
Iraq in order to prevent Bush's misguided plan, sold on the basis of a 
phony threat, from bequeathing to the United States and the world what 
may well be a true threat.

full: http://www.thenation.com/issue.mhtml?i=20041011

===

OP-ED COLUMNIST
The Prince of Tides, Tacking and Attacking
By MAUREEN DOWD

Published: September 23, 2004

LOS ANGELES — I had to come all the way to Hollywood to find Democrats 
who can actually sound sincere when they say John Kerry has turned a corner.

(clip)

Yet Mr. Kerry's case has a hollow center. He was asked at his press 
conference on Tuesday about W.'s snide reminders that his rival gave him 
authority to go to war (and, playing frat pledge to W.'s rush chairman, 
inanely agreed that he would still have voted to give that authority 
even if there were no W.M.D.).

That vote, he replied, was correct "because we needed to hold Saddam 
Hussein accountable for weapons. That's what America believed."

Not all Americans.

The administration rolled the Democrats on the authorization vote. It 
was clear at the time that going after Saddam to punish Osama made no 
sense, that Cheney & Co. were going to use Saddam as a lab rat for all 
their old neocon agendas. It was clear, as the fleet sailed toward Iraq, 
that the Bush crew had no interest in diplomacy - that it wanted to 
castrate the flaccid U.N., the flower child Colin Powell and his 
pinstriped State Department, snotty Old Europe, and the despised Saddam 
to show that America is a hyperpower that is not to be messed with.

As I quoted a girlfriend saying in September 2002, a month before Mr. 
Kerry's authorization vote, "Bush is like the guy who reserves a hotel 
room and asks you to the prom."

When Mr. Kerry says it was the way the president went about challenging 
Saddam that was wrong, rather than the fact that he challenged Saddam, 
he's sidestepping the central moral issue.

It was wrong for the president to take on Saddam as a response to 9/11, 
to pretend the dictator was a threat to our national security, to drum 
up a fake case on weapons and a faux link to Al Qaeda, and to divert our 
energy, emotions and matériel from the real enemy to an old enemy whose 
address we knew.

It was wrong to take Americans to war without telling them the truth 
about why we were doing it and what it would cost.

It wasn't the way W. did it. It was what he did.

full: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/23/opinion/23dowd.html

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