Dear Senator Kerry,
Over the past several weekends I have been forced to read countless (unsolicited) letters of advice given to you in the Washington opinion pages. As none of these has had the slightest impact upon what you are doing, and as almost all of them have offered pretty lousy advice, I do not believe I can do you more harm than has already been done. While I am confident you will ignore what I am about to say, merely to set the record straight proved to be a temptation I simply cannot resist.
But in a sense the old rogue beat me to it. Even about to undergo quadruple bypass surgery to save his life, Bill Clinton, the political rock star of his generation, as usual got it right: stop talking about Vietnam.
By offering far too much of your Vietnam record at your convention (and far too little about your two decades in the Senate that followed) you walked directly into the Swift Boat controversy. Right or wrong, bringing up the most divisive war in modern American history was likely to needlessly alienate a lot of voters. Worse still, it brought back to public attention your emotional, somewhat overwrought (why does everyone of that period, both pro- and anti-war, look and sound like they need to sleep for around a week?) congressional testimony as a leader of Vietnam veterans against the war.
Too often criticism of this era sounds anti-American, rather than anti-Nixon, anti-LBJ, or anti-policy. And if theres one thing moderate Americans wont stand for its people who seem to critique what the country is, not what the country does. So Vietnam is best left to the side simply say you went, got shot at for your country and the other guy did not.
Since Vietnam, Americans have been sceptical of Democratic initiatives regarding foreign and security policy. According to a report in 2003 in the Economist, a generic Democrat finished fifteen points behind a generic Republican in the publics estimation of who could best conduct American foreign policy. Remember it was the anti-war movement, with its naïve utopian disdain for American interests, which drove the neo-conservatives from the Democratic party, and helped elect Republican presidents in six of the past nine presidential contests.
You have long been a muscular Wilsonian, and have long since eschewed (if you ever held) the views of the Governor Dean wing of your party. Bringing this up has merely reminded a lot of undecided voters of what makes them nervous about Democrats in the first place. Dont let this somewhat unfair portrayal of your career dwell on a comparatively few years in the early 70s, rather than the decades since. In the footsteps of the wizard of Hope, Arkansas, change the subject.
It was the Vietnam issue that first becalmed your campaign, ending the small wave of momentum you were riding up until then. Worse still, it got you off-message, which is not something you can accuse the Republicans of doing. President Bushs chief political adviser, Karl Rove, is shooting too low in emulating Mark Hanna, the Svengali-figure behind the epoch-changing victories of William McKinley in the 1890s, which ushered in a generation of Republican presidential dominance. Rove is even better than that.
The Republican convention in New York presented the faces of just those attractive liberal and maverick Republicans that independents find the most compelling (sadly, Rudolph Giuliani, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and John McCain are not running American foreign policy). These three stars may be the future of the party, they are not its present though this was not made apparent by the tightly scripted and on-message convention. With the exception of Dick Cheney, the vice-president, there was a complete absence of the less photogenic (but more powerful) neo-conservatives from the primetime spotlight.
But it is in this message that you, Senator Kerry, have one last chance. For while President Bushs poll numbers have remained consistently high regarding fighting the war on terror in general (this is quite defensible to ordinary Americans for the commonsense reason that there has not been another major attack on the American mainland), his Iraq numbers remain shaky. Support for Iraq is split almost evenly, but even those in favour of the action are decidedly nervous about the fact that there has been no let-up in the carnage despite the transfer of power on 28 June. The president has been crystal- clear: Iraq is a vital part of fighting the war on terror, and is central to winning the confrontation with al-Qaida.
You must be able to hit this piñata (candidly, if you cannot, you probably dont have the communication skills to be president in the first place). You started well, saying Iraq was not vital to the war on terror, but was a dead-end, misdirecting American men, money, material, and most importantly intellectual effort away from Osama bin Laden towards a very nasty but largely de-clawed Saddam. The Vietnam controversy has completely stultified the germination of this entirely sensible point into a coherent, big picture difference with the President, one that took on his strength (the war on terror), by highlighting his weakness (Iraq).
The race has come down to Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida. Whoever wins two of these three states will be the next president. You are even-to- slightly-behind in Pennsylvania, though demographics still favour you there. You are behind in the other two, beyond the margin of error. By every polling measure, foreign affairs issues are the dominant concern in this campaign. Put bluntly, you have nothing to lose and everything to gain by making this big picture argument about the direction in foreign affairs in a post-11 September world. Even better, the country has everything to gain by such an argument.
Best,
John Hulsman
