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By Eleanor Clift
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John Kerry disappointed a lot of Democrats when he said that he would have voted for the resolution that gave George W. Bush the authority to invade Iraq even had Kerry known then what he knows now--that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction and no ties to Al Qaeda. What then would be the grounds for war? That Saddam Hussein was a despicable human being?
Kerry tried to explain. He stood by his vote, but he would have handled the warmaking authority differently. Bush, on a five-state campaign swing, taunted Kerry for "finally clearing that up."
It was classic Kerry, full of subtleties that get lost in translation. Kerry's position is actually quite responsible, but he's getting no help from the national press corps in conveying it to the voters. In October 2002, when Bush asked Congress to give him war powers, the administration was in the midst of a diplomatic negotiation with Saddam. The threat of force passed by Congress pushed Saddam into allowing the weapons inspectors back into Iraq. Denying Bush the authority would have emasculated American diplomacy.
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What happened next was a rush to war by Bush. Kerry says he would have taken more time to let the inspectors finish their work, which may have made war moot, and to assemble a broader international coalition in the spirit of Bush I. ("The issue has never been whether we were right to hold Saddam accountable," Kerry advisor Rand Beers said in a statement issued earlier this week. "The issue is that we went to war without our allies, without properly equipping our troops and without a plan to win the peace.")
Kerry may have lost a few [Howard] Deaniacs with his tortured explanation and his refusal to condemn outright the Iraq war. But most Democrats are willing to cut Kerry whatever slack he needs just so he dislodges Bush from office. It's the swing votes Kerry is after, that narrow band of people who will decide the election. Swing voters are disproportionately female, young and alienated. They don't like the war, but they're not antiwar either.
Getting into their heads is as much a job for a therapist as it is for a campaign consultant. Donna Brazile, who was Al Gore's campaign manager, recalls going to a focus group with 12 undecided women in the fall of 2000. Brazile is African-American, and she was amazed at the number of categories pollsters had for white women: soccer moms, waitress moms, singles, seniors, etc. Sixteen in all, she says, whereas black women, when it comes to voting, are monolithic. "We make up our minds and that's it," she says.
At the focus group with white women, one woman said that deciding who to vote for was like going to the prom. "Wow," Brazile thought. That was a new one. The woman continued: Al Gore would bring a corsage, and he would ask her parents' permission, and he would arrive right on time. George Bush, on the other hand, would show up in a convertible with the top down, and he wouldn't have checked with her parents. "And I would run right out," the woman concluded on a note of triumph. Brazile figured Gore wasn't going to get that vote.
What moves voters is as much art as science. No candidate has won the popular vote without carrying Roman Catholics, and both Bush and Kerry are wooing the Catholic vote. A recent poll shows Catholics evenly divided, with 40 percent committed to each candidate, and 18 percent undecided--a high number in this polarized electorate. Bush appealed to the pope when he visited the Vatican earlier this year to encourage the bishops to get more involved in the U.S. election by pushing their opposition to gay marriage. Bush did Kerry a favor by activating the bishops because now everybody knows Kerry is a practicing Catholic, and that's a benefit when one out of four voters is Catholic--and they're congregated in the battleground states.
Gore narrowly won the Catholic vote in 2000, and it's a safe bet Kerry will do better if only because he's Catholic himself. Bush's attempt to drive a wedge between Kerry and the Roman Catholic Church is likely to backfire among undecided Catholics who don't like religious dogma forced on them. The church's teachings are so ignored by Catholics that they poll like other Americans on issues like gay marriage and abortion. A significant number of Catholics may not even realize the church is opposed to birth control. These "cafeteria Catholics" pick and choose, but so does Bush. He's with the church hierarchy when it comes to denying birth-control counseling as part of U.S. aid packages overseas, but he's opposed to the pope when it comes to the war in Iraq.
The Republican message is don't vote for Kerry because he supports abortion rights. Kerry thinks abortion is wrong, but he's not going to impose his religious beliefs on the country. Bush on the other hand has turned his religious beliefs about embryonic stem cells into public policy.
Voters have the choice between a president who governs by belief and a challenger who puts his faith in rational decisionmaking.
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