On Tue, 25 May 2004, Doug Henwood wrote:
> >I have to wonder if Zinni, Scowcroft, Schwarzkopf, Clark and Shinseki
> >have no problem standing up to say the war in Iraq is bullshit, why is
> >our hero and great conscience of Vietnam, John Kerry so shy?
>
> Generals can be against a war; Democrats can't so easily. Dems are
> always under suspicion that they're pansies and peaceniks, so they often
> go out of their way to prove the opposite.
It is also SOP in elections to fake to the opposite side. Bush the radical rightist sounded almost like a liberal he was so moderate when he was running. Of course it was all lies. But if he'd shown his true colors beforehand he'd never have gotten elected. The Dems are the same -- well, not the part about being radical. But certainly the part about misrepresenting themsleves in order to get elected. Especially when they are challengers. Their goal is simple: to be all things to all people.
This is especially true on foreign policy. Almost everything that every candidate says on the campaign trail is spectacularly untrue. Bush said he was dead against nation building. Clinton said he was going to bash China and never intervene in the Balkans. Bush the elder spent most of his term sucking up to Saddam.
You can of course retort that there were "events, dear boy." But that's just the point. Foreign policy is nothing but events. Policies almost only get changed during crises (where by definition the old policy doesn't work and you need a new one, which stays put until the next one).
So it doesn't matter what they say on the campaign trail. What matters is their general principles and the company they keep and their susceptibility to influence by your side. Bush listens respectfully to apocalyptics and dismisses a million protesters as a fringe group. Kerry would be the opposite. Admittedly it's a damned narrow range of choice. But it's the only choice people have ever gotten on foreign policy in presidential elections. (There wasn't even that much difference in policy terms between Nixon and McGovern when it came to Vietnam.) This underlying context is all that matters. Campaign yak about foreign policy is all said to get votes. Not a single word of it should be taken as a policy statement.
Candidates are sometimes held to account for breaking campaign promises about taxes. But never for breaking promises about foreign policy. so they have zero incentive to say anything except what they think will win them marginal voters. You can argue (as the left perennially does for the Dems, and the right for the Repugs) that they would win more marginal voters with a "heat up the base fuck the other side" strategy. But don't sink into despair as if all this palaver was true.
Michael