Kerry's Speech

To put it politely, I thought that was crap.

Every smart person I've expressed this view to who disagrees with me, has disagreed by going meta. "No, no," they say, "Kerry did what he needed to do." Or, "well of course you wouldn't say something like that in a speech." Perhaps this is right, perhaps this is wrong. But while there's nothing wrong with meta, you shouldn't address meta-issues until you've decided what your own first-order reaction is. My reaction is that it was crap.

Not every speech needs specifics and not every speech needs to be short, but if your speech is going to be long, then it really ought to have some specifics. Otherwise it's just bloated. Mainly, I'm pissed about Iraq. How to handle Iraq is the most important question facing the president and he just punted. On other looming foreign policy issues (Iran, North Korea, Sudan) where, again, the president can pretty much do whatever he wants we are left with no idea of what a President Kerry would want to do. Nor do we even have a particularly smart backward-looking critique of the Iraq War. It's bad, of course, that the president wasn't straight with the American people about the case for war. Nevertheless, if the deception had been in service of a wildly successful policy, this would be the kind of thing one could more-or-less shrug off. Similarly, contrary to Kerry's accusation Bush didn't go into Iraq without a plan, he went in with a bad plan. But Kerry doesn't get into any of this. Nor did he so much as mention our general strategic situation in the Middle East, offering an opinion one way or the other about the alliances with Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt.

And then there was the silliness about outsourcing which I'm quite sure Kerry doesn't believe but couldn't risk throwing in anyway. Even worse, though, is that he gave a speech touching on trade issues and didn't say anything at all about supporting programs that help compensate the losers in trade. So we propose one "solution" that won't, in fact, do much for the victims of globalization while ignoring initiatives that actually could help the people in need.

Domestic stuff was mostly blah. Kerry seems to have misdescribed his own health care plan, which is too bad because it's a good plan. Instread, he read Dennis Kucinich's health care speech. If it's "a right, not a privilege" then why doesn't Kerry have a policy proposal that reflects that sentiment.We had a kind of veiled reference to gay marriage, but no mention of actual gay people. I could go on and probably will tomorrw, but for now I'm tired.

Crap.

And, yes, Bush's will be worse, Bush is always bullshitting.