Democracy in Peril

Bush's campaign has mastered at least one of Sun Tsu's ancient rules of warfare: When you are weak, appear strong.

By Steve Sebelius

THE WRONG ANSWER: It was the worst kind of rhetorical trap: President Bush was challenging Sen. John Kerry to say whether or not he would have voted to go to war in Iraq, with the benefit of months of hindsight. The right answer was clearly no. How could anyone say they would still support a war to rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, a burgeoning nuclear weapons program and links to Al-Qaeda's Sept. 11 attacks when there were no weapons, no nukes and no Sept. 11 links?

But Kerry said yes anyway. And when the history of the 2004 presidential election is written, that answer will represent a key chapter, a flubbed opportunity for Kerry to differentiate himself from Bush in a clear and compelling way.

Instead, buried under a thicket of his own self-created nuance, Kerry is daily painted as a flip-flopper by an effective, focused Bush-Cheney campaign. And if he's to dig out of that thicket, he's got to start now. All is not lost. But the American people are going to have to wake up to the fact that Bush's campaign has mastered at least one of Sun Tsu's ancient rules of warfare: When you are weak, appear strong.

Because on issue after issue, Bush attacks Kerry on subjects where the president's own position is far, far worse than Kerry's.

Take the war. Kerry may have had trouble articulating his position on the war, but Bush is the one who took the country to war. One by one, he's seen his prewar justifications fall, the death toll for U.S. soldiers rise and terrorism risks increase. But Bush tries to convince us that Kerry is the worse of the two on war.

Consider Yucca Mountain. Bush signed the designation of Yucca as the nation's nuclear waste dump, yet he attacks Kerry for casting votes on both sides of the issue. Are we really to believe Bush's straight talk (boiled down, it says "screw Nevada!") is better than Kerry's ("not on my watch!")?

Bush is counting on the fact that Americans appreciate a consistent, straight talker, and that they won't notice the one, glaring defect: You can be utterly consistent and utterly wrong at the same time. If a person makes a mistake and sticks with it, even when he sees the contrary evidence, he's stubborn, not a leader. By contrast, if a person makes a mistake, realizes it and sets a new course, he's not a flip-flopper. He's a person who's learned something. And that should never be considered a bad thing.

That's why Kerry should have answered the president by saying no, he would not have gone to war. Because it would have shown he's learned something, and put it into practice.

In the end, this nation has much more to fear from Bush, who cannot admit mistakes or change course, even when he's been proven wrong, than from Kerry. But will the senator be able to convince voters of that in the next two months? If he does, it will show he really is able to learn from his mistakes.