As the war in Iraq spins out of control, why isn't John Kerry launching a frontal assault on Bush's failed policies?
As the war in Iraq seemed to spiral out of control -- with more than 30 U.S. soldiers and hundreds of Iraqis killed since the weekend, with the charred corpses of American citizens hanging from a bridge in Fallujah and Iraqi kidnappers threatening to burn foreigners alive, with Shiite and Sunni uprisings making a mockery of Bush administration claims that Americans would be "greeted as liberators" -- Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry traveled to Washington Wednesday to deliver a major policy address at Georgetown University. His subject: the federal budget deficit.
The subject was much the same for the Kerry campaign all week. This was the week Kerry campaign planners penciled in budget talk, and they weren't about to let the war bump them off message. For much of the week, the only hint of Iraq on the Kerry campaign's home page was a small-type link to a speech Kerry gave in Iowa when Saddam Hussein was captured four months ago. On Thursday morning, the Web site featured a waving American flag and a milquetoast comment from Kerry minimizing his differences with the president and honoring the sacrifices of fallen soldiers.
And even when Iraq fit into Kerry's budget message, the Kerry camp steered clear of it. Explaining the absence of Iraq funding in a budget analysis the campaign released this week, Kerry surrogate Sen. John Corzine said: "We wanted to make sure this wasn't focused on the debate about whether we should or shouldn't support our troops."
Iraq is exploding in Bush's lap, but Kerry seems to be the one running scared. Although Kerry has made sporadic comments about Iraq throughout the week -- in a radio interview Wednesday, he called the war "one of the greatest failures of diplomacy and failures of judgment that I have seen in all the time that I've been in public life," and on Thursday he repeated his attack on Bush's unilateralist approach to the war -- he has not made the war a centerpiece of his campaign. As a young naval officer just back from Vietnam, John Kerry had the courage to help lead the nation out of one misguided military adventure; as a U.S. senator and presidential candidate, why is Kerry so cautious, so careful, so tentative now?
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http://salon.com/news/feature/2004/04/09/missingkerry/index.html