The Main Election Issue

Yahoo! News - Newsview: Iraq May Be Main Election Issue

Tom Raum writes provides a neat little synopsis of the horse race issues that surround the current presidential contest. His central thesis appears to be that "The turmoil in Iraq is changing the political equation for President Bush and Democratic rival John Kerry." To which one can only say: Y'think?

What concerns me are some of the little nuggets scattered further down:

Some analysts now are suggesting the race could broaden into a national referendum on Bush's Iraq policy. . . .
Also, the Massachusetts senator has had to walk a cautious line as he decides how hard to go after Bush as commander in chief without risking a backlash. . . .
Kerry already has drawn criticism from Republicans who accuse him of politicizing the prisoner-abuse issue. . . .
Bush and Kerry spent last week stressing domestic issues. Bush campaigned on education, Kerry on health care.
It was hard for their message to get out when local and regional news increasingly is influenced by pictures and stories from Iraq.

Iraq simply is the number one news story. As interested as I am in seeing Kerry get his message out on education, for example, when I ran across a news story on the topic last week, my reaction was, "Yeah, right, I'll get to that later." And I will. But what I and I can only assume a large number of Americans are concerned about right now are what is going on in Abu Ghraib? where are we supposed to get $25 extra billion to pay for unspecified expenses in Iraq? as the international anger being directed toward this country spreads, sometimes violently, what can we do to turn this trainwreck around?

This puts Kerry in a damned-if-you-do-and-damned-if-you-don't situation. If he goes about the normal business of a presidential campaign at this stage of the race, he'll have a hard time getting his message across. If he responds to the issues that seem most to absorb the public at the moment, he has to balance the strength of his response against the fact that he is dealing directly with national security. He can neither give false impressions to allies or foes about what this nation will do or not do in the next 6 months, nor can he appear to exploit issues simply to be scoring political hits on the President and his administration (regardless of the spin that the Bush campaign wants to put on whether Kerry just blew his nose for some political purpose).

Yet Kerry cannot simply ignore what is so obviously creating havoc both domestically and internationally.

Kerry is doing the things that he should be doing for his campaign. He's raising money. He's criss-crossing the country to make campaign speeches that lay out his position on domestic issues. He's actively interviewing candidates for vice-president. The Democratic Convention is still some weeks away, so, if this were a "normal" election year, he'd not only be right on target, but well ahead of what needed to be done.

The problem is that this year is anything but normal. Kerry has to speak out, partly because he has to give voice to the frustrations and concerns that all decent Americans feel about the events in Iraq and elsewhere in the world. He also has to speak out to make it clear that, while domestic issues matter a great deal in the upcoming election, our foreign relations and how we conduct them have to be scrutinized, evaluated, and (yea, verily) changed to a new and vastly improved model.