Kerry can't make a decision; Bush makes them too quickly. Kerry changes his mind by the month; Bush almost never changes his mind. Kerry thinks obsessively about process questions, but can't seem to come up with a core conviction; Bush is great at coming up with clear goals, but is not so great about coming up with the process to get there.

That's why he's been fuzzy about the big things over the entire course of his career. That's why he has changed his mind on big issues with such astonishing rapidity. That's why he gets twisted into pretzels, like vowing to continue fighting the Iraq war, which he says was a mistake to begin.

On this and related issues, Kerry's relentless drive "came largely from Vietnam veteran syndrome," said former aide and investigator Jack Blum, describing the disillusionment that returning soldiers often felt as a result of that divisive war. "You come home and discover that people who are running the war are just interested in covering their ass; meanwhile, real people are dying real deaths. ... This was a very searing business."  ...

As the Iran-contra scandal unfolded, John Kerry would find an outlet for his prosecutorial skills, his thirst for media attention, and his still-simmering outrage over "seeing the government lie, and realizing the consequences" in Vietnam, as he recently put it.

Kerry earned the "unbounded respect and admiration" of McCain, who, like others in the Senate, originally viewed Kerry with suspicion. "You get to know people and you make decisions about them," says McCain. "I found him to be the genuine article."

Bush, by contrast, is steadfast and resolute. But his weakness is statecraft. That is the task of relating means to ends, of orchestrating the institutions of government to achieve your desired goals.

George W. Bush certainly doesn't want to be tried as a war criminal -- he made that clear when he abandoned the World Court on the war crime issue (a decision he proudly flaunted onstage Thursday night). Pundits around the world disapproved for this abstract reason and that, but what seems clear now is that, since Bush already knew that he was going to invade Iraq, he wanted to cover his rear, and didn't fancy seeing himself hauled to The Hague like Slobodan Milosevic. But he and Karl Rove seem to have taken a leaf out of Milosevic's defense manual -- don't admit you did anything wrong (to do so would be sending "a mixed message"), blame your enemies, and be as aggressive as possible in claiming the moral high ground. In fact, at this point, some illusionary moral high ground is the only defense Bush and Blair have, as Blair showed when he delved into his "reasons" for invading Iraq on Tuesday. Bush, in the debate, sounded as if he's been warned by his lawyer that to acknowledge mistakes is to lay himself open to a product liability lawsuit.

He showed for all to see what a minor mind he goes around with. I looked at this guy Bush last night and thought about young people dying in Iraq because of him. And there will be more and more because he is a man sitting with a car full of people on the train tracks and he doesn't know enough to get off with the train coming. Watch the ages of the dead night after night, day after day - 21 ... 23 ... 19 ... 25 ... Anybody responsible for getting people this young killed is a national menace.

 

Dumb people always are.

Carol Towarnicky, Knight-Ridder:

Before tonight, and especially at their convention, the Bush-Cheney campaign did a masterful job in turning John Kerry into a cartoon character, a "French" long-winded dilettante who wouldn't be able to keep to the time limits and would change his position every time he opened his mouth.

They may have done the guy a favor - because the John Kerry who showed up tonight was none of those things. He spoke directly, simply, and really pointed toward the future, with a plan for Iraq. He looked like a president. This might make the folks who only knew the caricature start to wonder whether they can believe other things the Bush-Cheney campaign is telling them.

Scott Lehigh, Boston Globe:

LADIES AND gentlemen, you wake today to a whole new presidential race. Last night, John Kerry won as clear a debate victory as we've seen since Ronald Reagan outdueled Jimmy Carter in 1980.

The senator that Americans saw on stage was hardly the shilly-shallying caricature that George W. Bush had been lampooning on the campaign trail. Nor was he the flatfooted candidate who fumbled his way through a disastrous August. Instead, the Democratic challenger seemed more serious and substantive, more knowledgeable and confident, than the man who holds the job. ...

Although Bush had some moments, at too many points the president seemed reduced to repeating simple assertions that sometimes bordered on the petulant: that a commander in chief couldn't send mixed messages, that Kerry, too, had seen Saddam as a threat in the months before the invasion, that people had to understand that nation-building is hard work.

James Ridgeway, The Village Voice:

Contrary to all the press predictions, John Kerry easily overcame George Bush in Thursday night's debate, taking the attack from the very beginning and never once losing control. It was a knockout—with Bush going down almost immediately and never getting back on his feet. The president appeared confused, left to mumble aloud on the subject of Iraq, "It's incredibly hard work."

In debating terms, Kerry controlled the floor from start to finish with one rapid fire attack after another. Bush never was able to break through. His famous frat-boy disdain was reduced to goofiness. Kerry made him look by turns ignorant, deceitful, churlish, and just plain out of it.

Bush tried to use his campaign's flip-flop line against Kerry, but it went nowhere. Kerry had such a clear control of facts and argument that the charge fell almost immediately, a spent and useless weapon.

More comments -- I'll add to this throughout the day. This is just a preliminary list -- 

 

Jeanne d'Arc: Karl Rove couldn't even spin the New York Post.

 

The BBC: Reactions favor Kerry

 

Eric Boehlert: Pundit Gut Reaction Roundup

 

Peter Canellos, Boston Globe: Kerry wins on confidence

 

Houston Chronicle: Kerry confident, Bush defensive

 

John Nichols: Whiner in Chief

 

Thomas Oliphant: Bush's Gaffe

 

William Saletan: Admit the truth

 

Joan Vennochi: Mission Accomlished -- for Kerry

 

The Bushies won't take this loss lying down.

They will selectively quote Kerry and twist his words around to try to steal tonight's victory.

(Though they didn't seem to have figured out a consistent line of attack immediately afterwards last night.)

Kerry's got a bit of a break, because any Bush attempt to counterspin the debate will fall into the little-read Saturday news.

But let's keep our guard up through the weekend.

Art. 33. No protected person may be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited.

Pillage is prohibited. Reprisals against protected persons and their property are prohibited.

...one of them said, and the others seemed to agree, that many like Bush better than Kerry because he identified better with people in a working-class neighborhood.

This caused me to speak. "They must be demented to say that. Do you know what schools he went to? Working-class neighborhood. That's Phillips Academy. Then Yale and Harvard."

"On a legend scholarship," a girl said.

"Legacy. That means if your father went to school, you could get in on your last name. He had more than his father. He had his grandfather. The grandfather had millions when that counted as real money."

They said a lot of the students and their families did not watch any news on television, and what they did watch was Fox, which gives the news with a foaming mouth, and maybe Good Morning America in the morning. The paper seemed to be the Athens News that comes out twice a week. Because of this, the worst rumors have spectacular chances of success in the area. "I told them that it was ridiculous to connect Saddam Hussein with the World Trade Center," one of the students said.

Maybe the Democrats should hire Ross Perot to explain to the "heartlanders" that Osama and Saddam are two different guys who never got along with each other, much less worked together. "See, people, it's just this simple ..."

The Manhattan students brought up gun love early in the interview. They must have found Midwestern gun culture astonishing. Manhattanites as a rule don't rely on guns for protection, unless they own liquor stores in bad neighborhoods.

But years ago I lived in a suburb of Cincinnati, and I remember that usually whenever a squirrel set off somebody's home security alarm the menfolk of the neighborhood would come running out of their homes waving handguns, ready to shoot some fleeing perpetrator.

I remember this vividly because my infant daughter's room was in a corner of the house nearest the street and also nearest the home of one of the more rabid gun-waving neighbors. A few times I scooped her out of her crib and brought her into the middle of the house to keep her safer from stray bullets. Fortunately the posse never actually shot at anybody.

In NYC neighborhoods with high drug traffic it sometimes happens that a gunfight breaks out, and stray bullets kill an innocent child. This does not inspire New Yorkers to go out and buy their own guns to protect themselves. On the contrary, New Yorkers generally don't approve of people carrying guns for protection.

After living here awhile, I came to understand why. New Yorkers habitually seek safety in numbers. If you keep to areas where there are lots of other people, you are generally safer than if you are somewhere isolated. New Yorkers prefer subway cars and elevators with at least a couple of other people inside, even if the other people are strangers. They stay in well-lit, high-traffic areas.

In short, they insulate themselveds from harm with lots of nearby human flesh. Thick crowds of strangers that an Ohioan would find suffocating are comforting to a New Yorker. The thought that somebody in the flesh shield might whip out a gun and start shooting that flesh is more frightening to New Yorkers than the burglaries that worried my neighbors in Ohio.

I'm not personally opposed to gun ownership. If I lived in an isolated cabin in Montana I'd probably keep a loaded shutgun on the wall, too. But in densely populated areas, guns may not be the self-defense tool of choice. This is a point many "heartlanders" cannot grasp.

A U.S. Congressman from Indiana, Mark Souder, is pushing a bill to end gun controls in Washington, D.C. Harold Meyerson writes in today's Washington Post:

Souder's bill legalizes ownership of semiautomatic weapons and armor-piercing ammunition. How this would increase security around the White House and the Capitol is something that Souder and Co. have neglected to explain, but no matter. The House Republican leadership knows the bill won't pass the Senate. The only reason it was even introduced was to force House Democrats -- a number of whom represent gun-loving districts -- to vote on this nonsense.

Gun control may be one of the purest Metro-Retro issues. Gun control is favored by Metros, who live in dense population areas, but not by Retros, who like to keep strangers at a distance. Retros live in terror that crazy elitist lefties will take their guns away and leave them vulnerable and unprotected from grizzlies or strangers or whatever.

But Retros might want to stop attacking gun control laws in places where people actually want gun control laws, which is what they're doing when they use gun control as a national wedge issue. Gun control only works as a Retro wedge issue because it's a "litmus test" issue for them, but not for Metros. Manhattanites don't stay awake at night worrying about Ohioans with semiautomatic weapons, so long as the weapons stay in Ohio.

But if the Metros ever get fired up on the gun control issue ... bye bye, Uzis.

Note: New York City has a much lower violent crime rate than most other large cities in the U.S.

Update: From the Washington Post:

The U.S. House of Representatives voted today to repeal virtually all of the District's gun laws, urged by gun rights groups to deliver a victory before the November election over the vehement objections of Washington leaders who denounced what they called a historic violation of home rule.

Voting 250-171, the House approved the D.C Personal Protection Act, which would end the District's ban on handguns and semi-automatic weapons, roll back registration requirements for ammunition and other firearms and decriminalize possession of unregistered weapons and carrying a gun in one's home or workplace. The bill also would prohibit the District's elected mayor and council from passing gun limits that exceed federal law or "discourage . . . the private ownership or use of firearms."

The mighty federal government strong-arming local authority ... it's what made America great, huh?

UPDATE: Reader Bruce Bretthauer emails:

If people want you to blog about other things than Dan Rather, what about Sandy Berger removing files from the National Archives? Is he still connected with the Kerry Campaign? Why doesn't Kerry have Berger take "administrative leave" while those accusations are sorted out? Why doesn't MSM care about this? Is the MSM explanation another example of "fraudulent but true"?

They do seem to have let that one drop.

Berger was cleared by the 9/11 Commission in August, a fact somewhat underreported by the evil "liberal" media. Apparently there are no more "accusations" to "sort out." (No Democrat is ever exonerated, of course. Most righties remain certain Bill Clinton was guilty of something in the Whitewater scam.)

I mention this case study because we are approaching election day in Afghanistan on Oct. 9. Six days later, voter registration begins in Iraq. Conditions in both places will be tense and chaotic. And in Washington, a mood of bogus tough-mindedness has swept the political class. As William Raspberry wrote yesterday in The Washington Post, "the new consensus seems to be that bringing American-style democracy to Iraq is no longer an achievable goal." We should just settle for what John Kerry calls "stability." We should be satisfied if some strongman comes in who can restore order.

The people who make this argument pat themselves on the back for being hard-headed, but the fact is they are naïve. They've got things exactly backward. The reason we should work for full democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan is not just because it's noble, but because it's practical. It is easier to defeat an insurgency and restore order with elections than without.

Brooks argues that a democratically elected, popularly supported government would bring more stability to Iraq in the long run than an unpopular dictator.

Next week, Brooks will discover that snow mostly falls in winter and that soup won't burn your tongue if you let it cool off first.

But instead of sniping at Kerry, Brooks should explain democracy to his buddies the Bushies, because they're the ones undermining real democracy in Iraq. For example, Time magazine reports that the Bushies had planned to use the CIA to support favored candidates in the allegedly upcoming Iraqi elections.

Juan Cole comments:

... this sort of behavior by the Bush administration fatally undermines the ideal of democracy in the Middle East. If Muslims think that "democracy" is a stalking horse for CIA control of their country, then they will flee the system and prefer independent-minded strongmen that denounce the US. The constitutional monarchies established in the Middle East by the British were similarly undermined in the popular imagination by the impression they gave of being mere British puppets. This was true of the Wafd Party in Egypt in the 1940s and early 1950s, which the Free Officers overthrew in 1952 in the name of national indepencence. It was also true in Iraq, where in 1958 popular mobs dragged the corpse of the pro-British Prime Minister Nuri al-Said through the streets and finished off the British-installed monarchy.

Brooks quotes William Raspberry talking about "American-style democracy." Whatever the arguments of Iraq war hawks and warbloggers, the subtext is nearly always "Iraqis should be more like us."  Surely, the neocons from the Project for a New American Century assumed that once Saddam Hussein was removed, the ideals of Locke and Jefferson would bloom in Iraq overnight.  

But the neocons forget the Jeffersonian principle that governments derive their powers from the consent of the governed. All along the Bushies have treated Iraqis as either children or savages who can't be expected to want what's good for them. Rummy and his Pentagon team tried to hand Iraq over to Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, for example. And much of the violence in Iraq today resulted from the bungling of interim governor Paul Bremer. 

Among other things, the neocons don't seem to have considered that, if given a choice, a majority of Iraqis might choose an Islamic government. If that's the case, seems to me no secular government will ever be legitimate to Iraqis.

Juan Cole explains much better than I can how U.S. meddling has already poisoned whatever chance the January elections might have had to produce a popular government. "Bush just wanted to buy himself an election, in the Bush tradition," he writes.

But David Brooks thinks that Bush policies favor democracy. Hoo boy, that's a good 'un. The Bushies don't like democracy in America; why would they want it for Iraq?

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Before Iraq, America's formidable appeal continued largely unabated. I never saw it embraced more ardently, poignantly, than on Sept. 12, 2001. I happened to be in Vienna, where from my hotel window I watched the entire city cry a collective tear for the America it was still crazy about. At the stroke of noon, all traffic froze. Nothing moved except long, black mourning banners unfurling from every government building as well as from many private houses. And the "Pummerin," the great bell of St. Stephen's Cathedral — a bell of ancient tradition that is so huge its swinging stresses the 15th century tower and is therefore rung just once a year, during midnight Mass on Christmas Eve — tolled a special requiem. Unforgettable, those plangent, plaintive peals echoed across a thousand roofs.

That day Vienna — along with much of Europe — trembled for the hope breathed by the word "America." An elastic, robust hope, lasting through war and peace, through irritations and disappointments.

To Europeans of nearly every stripe, the statue in New York harbor brandishes not a torch but a tommy gun. Lady Liberty has transmogrified into an ominous colossus. Here is the ultimate Godfather, enforcing with missile and aircraft carrier a protection racket on all seven seas. Here is an America shrugging armored shoulders at the ozone hole, at collateral damage, at its own poor, an America practicing domination in the name of freedom. Here is the land of milk and honey turned into the fortress of bottom line and bomb.

The European press is grasping at what would normally be considered minutae. Why? Because they are at a loss to understand how America as a nation could even possibly be able to contemplate giving Mr. Bush a small minority of the vote, let alone a winning ticket. And, at a loss, they look to the process to explain things. “What,” they seem to really be asking, “is deluding Americans into this insanity?” It is an understandable question for people to whom WWII exists in living memory.

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