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The Challenger Plays Defense
 Mike
Tyson has just lost another fight to an unknown underdog.
 By
all accounts, his
opponents have finally found a strategy that works: Attack.
Tyson may be a fearsome
slugger, but the word is out that he doesn’t like to get hit. He used
to scare his opponents so badly that they shriveled into sheer defense,
leaving the initiative entirely to him. That’s no longer the case.
Now, late in his career, he’s being forced to adapt to the other
guy’s style, and he can’t do it.
Contrast Muhammad Ali. For a
long time it wasn’t clear whether he could take a punch, because he
was so seldom hit. He was preternaturally quick and evasive. He forced the
other guy to fight his fight. Later in his career he slowed down and showed
he could take a punch, all right — far too many of them. But he made
up for lost speed with courage and ring savvy, still dictating the terms of
the fight.
Which brings me to John Kerry,
who seems determined to fight George W. Bush’s fight. Instead of
challenging Bush forthrightly on a war most Americans now agree was a
mistake, he says he would have voted to give Bush the authority to wage it
even if he’d known that Bush’s whole premise — that
Iraq had an arsenal of fearful weapons — was wrong!
No wonder that with less than
three months before the election, voters aren’t quite sure where
Kerry stands, or where he may stand tomorrow. This gives Bush the
initiative, and though he’s not the world’s brainiest guy,
he’s a good enough politician to know what to do with it: Attack.
You don’t unseat an
incumbent with a defensive strategy, but that’s what Kerry is
trying to do. Ever since the Democrats’ convention, he has stressed
his toughness, his military record, his opposition to terrorism (as if
anyone favored it!). Instead of developing a compelling theme of his own,
he is essentially trying to rebut Republican charges that he’d be
soft on terror. He’s letting Bush set his agenda — a fatal
mistake.
![[Breaker quote: Flip-flops and conversions]](2004breakers/040812.gif) This
gives undecided voters little reason to vote for Kerry, but it gives antiwar
Democrats an excellent reason to defect to Ralph Nader. Nobody wonders
where Nader stands. He’s flatly against Bush’s war. And
unlike Kerry, he’s willing to go on the attack and shake things up. So
Kerry is doing one of the worst things a politician can do: alienating his
own natural base. And right in the middle of a campaign, when he needs
every vote he can get!
Bush has a better sense of
Kerry’s weaknesses than Kerry has of Bush’s. During a season
in which Bush’s poll ratings have been sinking, the challenger has
somehow come to seem more vulnerable than the incumbent.
As the challenger, Kerry needs a
bold approach, not a passive one. His position on the war is arguable, I
suppose, and he has in fact explained it fairly well, for those who are
interested. But American elections aren’t decided by fine
distinctions, and a jingoistic wartime president can be expected to
trounce Monsieur Nuance every time.
A presidential campaign is no
time for an identity crisis. Kerry wants to play down his liberal Senate
record, even though he has earned the highest rating of the hyperliberal
Americans for Democratic Action, plus the endorsement of the American
Communist Party. Everyone noticed the way the recent convention avoided
almost all specifics of his political life over the last twenty years.
The real problem goes deeper
than Kerry’s notorious “flip-flops.” Anyone is entitled
to change his mind, and some people only reach their heights after
heartfelt conversions. But a flip-flop is qualitatively different from a
conversion. Nobody would say St. Paul flip-flopped on the road to
Damascus. Kerry’s flips don’t rise to the dignity of
conversions, because they don’t signify either the painful
abandonment or the sudden arrival of true convictions.
No, Kerry’s problem is
that even when he was building that long liberal record, he never became a
symbol of anything in the public mind. He hasn’t been identified
with any particular cause or principle that he can lay a sort of personal
claim to. He’s been like a fish who merely swims along with the
school. But he hasn’t even led the school.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2004 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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