When you've lost the NYTimes....

[dude1394]

nytimes does an unbiased story on kerry and doesn't quite like what it finds

When you’ve lost the New York Times…

…you’ve lost the election, at least if you’re a Democrat. While John Kerry hasn’t quite lost the Times, he’s come remarkably close with the New York Times Magazine interview that the blogosphere and the Bush campaign have latched onto over the weekend. These days, there’s a great way to see if an interview you did was good or bad for your campaign: if your opponent’s blog highlights it, and your own blog ignores it, chances are that it was somewhere in between a problem and a disaster. This one is somewhere near the “disaster” part of the spectrum. As Jim Geraghty writes, “I’m sure the New York Times did not set out to torpedo the Kerry candidacy… And yet, reading it, part of me wonders if this article - and the ads that have resulted from it - will mark a turning point in the final month of the race.”

The article’s author, Matt Bai, is going to catch a lot of flack for this from his liberal collegues. At the least, he’s put Kerry on the defensive for the rest of the week. At the most, he’s assured Bush the victory. We’re talking Ralph Nader-style flack here. But Bai deserves credit, from everyone. Obviously sympathetic to Kerry, he nonetheless (the aptness of that word says a lot about Kerry) made it his goal to outline what, exactly, is Kerry’s “foreign policy vision.” Unfortunately for Kerry, he finds it. And it is not very palatable, even to Mr. Bai himself.

Bai starts off with some quick background, mainly outlining Bush’s overall vision, and noting that Democrats have not come up with an alternative. Then, he starts wading into the pool that is John Kerry’s foreign policy. He starts by dipping just a toe in, quoting Richard “Please, please make me Secretary of State” Holbrooke: “We’re not in a war on terror, in the literal sense… The war on terror is like saying ‘the war on poverty.’ It’s just a metaphor.” Most Americans, however, recognize that LBJ’s “War on Poverty” was a dramatic, unabashed failure–the sort of failure we, as a nation, refuse to have in the War on Terror.

Bai then goes on to talk with the candidate himself, and things do not get better. Bai asks Kerry how 9-11 changed him:

‘’It accelerated – ‘’ He paused. ‘’I mean, it didn’t change me much at all. It just sort of accelerated, confirmed in me, the urgency of doing the things I thought we needed to be doing. I mean, to me, it wasn’t as transformational as it was a kind of anger, a frustration and an urgency that we weren’t doing the kinds of things necessary to prevent it and to deal with it.'’

Here we see the remarkable arrogance of the man. All of America, and our president, has had the humility to admit that we did not take terrorism seriously enough before 9-11, that we did not realize that we were in a war, that our foreign policy was not what it should have been. But not Kerry. Kerry, instead, seized upon the one thing in his small political repertoire that he could connect with the attacks–in this case, international money laundering, or what Kerry expands to become “this entire dark side of globalization,” which Bai discusses in greater detail later on–and determines that, if only we had all listened to him, this whole thing could have been averted. It’s staggering. But Kerry doesn’t stop digging:


the times story