Kerry’s bizarre pledge to defend America

In his acceptance speech Kerry said, in his typical self-important manner: “I defended this country as a young man and I will defend it as president.”

Isn’t this protesting too much? Isn’t a prospective president’s willingness to defend the country to be taken for granted? Since when does a presidential candidate feel obligated to assure the American people that he will actually defend the country if attacked? Only if there’s doubt—indeed, a quite reasonable doubt, in this case—that he will do so. So Kerry feels issues this non sequitur that because he served in the Vietnam war 35 years ago, he will defend America from its enemies today. Notwithstanding his reputation for intellectual sophistication, the statement can’t withstand a millisecond of analysis. Is he saying that someone who has not served in combat would not defend America if it were attacked? His own opponent, President Bush, instantly disproves that ridiculous notion, as he obviously showed great will and ability to use force against our enemies when we were attacked. Is Kerry therefore saying just the opposite, that his experience in that bad Vietnam war assures that he will eschew any strong defense policy, that he will avoid the use of force at all costs, and that such pacificism is in fact what makes him a strong leader? If Kerry’s statement has a real meaning to him, this is it. Either way, however, the statement makes no sense. It only makes sense in Kerry’s world, a world in which all logic and meaning revolves around the drama of John Kerry’s specialness.

It was the same way with his Christmas in Cambodia story. His personal epiphany, recounted repeatedly over the years, was the basis for his foreign policy. Such self-absorption shows a profound inability to think in a serious way, or, rather, to think at all. Kerry substitutes personal experience (or, as in the case of the Cambodia tale, a narcissistic fantasy of personal experience) for actual thought about the world in which we live. At bottom, Kerry is interesting as a head case, or perhaps as a character in a novel. He is not interesting as a politician.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 21, 2004 08:13 PM | Send