The Guy in the Stands

After excoriating President Bush in a speech yesterday at NYU Wagner in New York for shortcomings that reside mostly in his own imagination, Senator Kerry, laid out four things the President must do now in Iraq. Presumably these are four steps he would take if he were president and which he offers to the public to help us distinguish how a Kerry presidency would differ from the Bush presidency.

Unfortunately for the Senator it is very difficult to find anything in these four items which is substantively different from what the Bush administration is, and has been, doing. Kerry may differ from Bush in how he would go about accomplishing these measures but the measures themselves have been underway for a long time now.

Here's what Kerry said that Bush needs to do:

First, the president has to get the promised international support so our men and women in uniform don't have to go it alone.

Second, the president must get serious about training Iraqi security forces.

Third, the president must carry out a reconstruction plan that finally brings tangible benefits to the Iraqi people, all of which, may I say, should have been in the plan and immediately launched with such a ferocity that there was no doubt about America's commitment or capacity in the very first moments afterwards. But they didn't plan.

Fourth, the president must take immediate, urgent, essential steps to guarantee that the promised election can be held next year. Credible elections are key to producing an Iraqi government that enjoys the support of the Iraqi people and an assembly that could write a constitution and yields a viable power-sharing agreement.

I challenge Viewpoint readers to find anything in this list that the Bush administration is not, or has not, worked assiduously to accomplish.

This is Kerry's problem. He's like the unpleasant guy who likes to sit in the stands ripping the coach on the sidelines for whatever failures he might have, but when you ask the critic what he would do differently his response is either pretty much indistinguishable from what the coach is actually doing or it displays a complete lack of understanding of the nature of the game on the field.

Kerry's criticisms of Bush vascillate between these two types. He tries to appeal to those who support fighting terrorists in Iraq by saying he would do what Bush is doing but do it in some vague way differently, or he tries to appeal to the left-wing base of the party by saying he would do quite the opposite of what Bush is doing. In one speech he claims he would fight the war, but more effectively, the next speech he'd bring the troops home as close to immediately as is practical. In one speech he would spend any amount of money to depose Saddam Hussein, in the next speech he laments the cost and says, as he did in New York, that deposing Hussein isn't worth it.

The Senator seems to suffer from multiple personality disorder, and it's become something of a parlor game to try to predict which of his personas will manifest itself next.