John Kerry got Secret Service protection last week, but that can't protect him from one of his own worst traits as a presidential candidate - an instinct for evasion and obfuscation. There was a moment in the recent Democratic debate in Milwaukee that crystalized this flaw in Kerry's political character.
Asked in the debate whether, having voted for the Senate resolution authorizing President Bush to take the country to war against Iraq, he felt any responsibility for U.S. casualties, Kerry gave a lengthy and convoluted response that ignored the question put to him. That gave John Edwards an opening to score.
"That is the longest answer I have ever heard to a yes-or-no question," the senator from North Carolina said. "We all accept responsibility for what we did."
Edwards said what Kerry should have said - yes, lawmakers who voted for the war resolution should feel some responsibility for the casualties suffered by American forces, although President Bush and his war council bear the greatest responsibility.
It's hard to imagine that Kerry will make the kind of mistakes that could jeopardize his grip on his party's nomination, but it's not difficult to look ahead to the fall election and see how Iraq is going to be an awkward issue for him to carry for the Democrats. Kerry needs to stop explaining, spinning and fuzzing up his prowar vote. If he regrets his vote and now believes the war was a mistake, he should say so. As decorated Vietnam veteran who remembers the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, he of all people should have known better than to give the president a blank check for military action. The more Kerry tries to explain his vote, the worse he looks.
In the latest issue of the Nation, a magazine on the political left, Jonathan Schell writes that ever since his prowar vote, Kerry "has trapped himself in a morass - a little quagmire in its own right - of self-contradictory, equivocating, evasive, incomplete, unconvincing explanations of his stand."
Kerry voted for the resolution, he said at the time, because he believed, based on the intelligence he had seen, Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and must be disarmed, by diplomacy if possible, by force if necessary. He claimed to believe that the president had promised to exhaust all diplomatic possibilities before resorting to military action.
On the campaign trail, where the war was the dominant issue early on, Kerry insisted he had only voted for "a process" and not for war. Yet, his criticism of Bush is not that the war was a mistake but that the president has mismanaged it.
Of the president, Kerry has said: "George Bush needs to take responsibility for his actions and set the record straight. That's the very least that Americans should be able to expect from the president of the United States. Either he believed Saddam Hussein had chemical weapons - or he didn't. Americans need to be able to trust their president - and they deserve the truth."
Schell writes that people also "deserve accountability and truth from opposition candidates as well. Someone ducking responsibility for his own actions is hardly in a strong position to call someone else to account."
In a recent editorial, the Washington Post called on Kerry to clarify his positions on a number of issues, including trade policy, gay marriage and, most of all, the Iraq war.
The Post said: "The most important confusion surrounds Mr. Kerry's position on Iraq. In 1991 he voted against the first Persian Gulf War, saying more support was needed from Americans for a war that he believed would prove costly. In 1998, when President Clinton was considering military steps against Iraq, he strenuously argued for action, with or without allies. Four years later he voted for a resolution authorizing invasion but criticized Mr. Bush for not recruiting allies. Last fall he voted against funding Iraqi reconstruction, but argued that he United States must support the establishment of a democratic government.
"Mr. Kerry's attempts to weave a thread connecting and justifying all these positions are unconvincing. He would do better to offer a more honest accounting."
To the extent the war will be an issue in this election, Kerry's convoluted and contradictory explanations of his war vote make him appear indecisive and unsteady - not exactly qualities voters are looking for in a commander in chief. If he wants to be seen as a credible alternative to George Bush, who deserves to be held accountable for the war, this Vietnam hero needs to extricate himself from a political quagmire of his own making. And he needs to reassure voters that he knows the difference between a vote for "a process" and a vote for war.
