A moment of context

Wayne Barrett, in "The Ad That Beats Bush" (Village Voice, Sep 14), pointed out that a Kerry attack ad on Bush for failing to capture bin Laden would refocus the campaign on Bush's failures in office:

With all its metered focus groups, the Kerry campaign remains blind to the core weakness of the Bush campaign... the abject failure of the Bush team to make America safer—either by corralling the killers or raising the defenses... No one better embodies the dismal three-year Bush record on terror than bin Laden and Zawahiri, who resurfaced in a new tape just last week looking healthy and threatening.

It makes all the sense in the world that the Bush convention—with a hundred references in major speeches to terror and 69 to Iraq or Hussein—mentioned Osama just once, and then only to blame him on Bill Clinton. What makes no sense is that bin Laden was never mentioned in Kerry's Boston show.

This meshes with some points raised by Tom Regan in "Annan: Invasion of Iraq 'illegal'", Christian Science Monitor. He quotes from Don Rumsfeld:

The Taliban regime is gone. Those still not killed or captured are on the run. ... Saddam Hussein's regime is finished. His sons are dead. He's in a prison cell, where he awaits the justice of the Iraqi people, which he will soon face. Libya has said now that it is renouncing its illicit weapons programs, and it says it will cooperate with the efforts to stop the spread of weapons of mass destruction and that it's seeking to reenter the community of civilized nations.

So the Republican party line is, apparently, "We are excellent at removing threats from countries with easy targets and weak militaries, but will not talk about our failures with stateless enemies." This is consistent with Bush's "with us or against us"/"states that harbor terrorists are as bad terrorists" rhetoric. Isn't this logic leading us to a dead end? Aside from the question of helping to rebuild what we decimate (and taking that into consideration before destroying shit), Democrats have a legitimate point in saying, nuance free, "Even if Bush's intentions behind prosecuting the war were correct, his failure should be obvious." I'd personally like to see the corollary that his intentions were also misguided, but I don't expect to see that from a prominent Democrat anytime soon.

So why isn't Kerry putting such an obvious flaw of Bush's at the top of his list of failures? I can think of a few reasons:

1. It's all strategy. Kerry doesn't want to blow his load too early – if things remain close and he waits until the run-up to the election, when even more people will be paying attention, he'll get more traction out of it. Seeing as Kerry recently made some serious changes in his campaign staff out of displeasure with the state of his campaign, however, I find this unlikely.

2. Kerry figures there's still a chance Bush will nab bin Laden and Zawahiri before the election; if he calls Bush on this now and gets refuted, he's toast. (Of course, if Bush nabs those two, Kerry's probably toast anyway.)

3. Kerry would have proceeded in a similar manner to Bush, and has too much character to attack Bush on an issue he honestly agreed with. I find this difficult to swallow on any level.

4. Kerry's campaign hasn't thought of it yet.

5. Kerry won't seriously consider using it until it gains some traction elsewhere.

My guess, if it could only be one of these, would be #5. Judging by his lifting of successful rhetoric from his opponents (Dean, Gephardt, Edwards) during the primaries, and his wait and see attitude about which spitballs stick when slung from his coalition of the scummy 527's, it's most likely that Kerry's people are unwilling to touch something – even something that they agree with – until someone else says it, takes the heat for it, but gets a good response.

Ah Democrats, isn't it great to have someone at the helm who will stand up for what's right regardless of the political cost? No? It's better to implicitly encourage other people to play dirty, fabricate character assassinations, and explode loopholes in campaign finance laws? Oh. Well, doesn't that make you as bad as the other guy?