MISSING THE (SWIFT) BOAT

WHY KERRY'S FLAILING AT CHENEY WON'T WASH

Before the confetti had even been swept from the floor of Madison Square Garden after President Bush's acceptance speech, John Kerry was ranting in Ohio at how terrible the GOP convention had been.

This is a very unusual--not to mention petty--thing to do following one's opponent's convention. The President gave the Democrats their good night's rest before lighting into them on the campaign trail. It's rather cheap and unseemly to be unable to control one's self enough to refrain from dragging your loyal followers out in the middle of the night to provide backdrop. What's more, Kerry's deranged focus tells us something very important about where this party is headed and what (if anything) the Senator must be thinking.

Kerry caterwauls that his "patriotism" has been questioned yet again, a charge that reappears every time someone has the audacity to recite his voting record or to quote his words from 1971 when his "patriotism" was the last of his concerns. He throws the gauntlet down before, of all people, Dick Cheney, sniffing that he questions whether five Vietnam deferments makes one more fit for office than his own clutter of medals.

The answer, of course, is no. Of course it doesn't.

But the problem is that winning medals 30-plus years ago during a four and a half month period doesn't make Kerry fit for the office, either.

What no one seems to get in this ridiculous one-upmanship is that military service is neither a requirement nor a qualification to be president of the United States. Franklin Roosevelt, obviously, didn't serve. Adolf Hitler did. Would anyone argue that Hitler's stint as a corporal during World War One (a wounded hero, at that) made him an appropriate leader for the German people? Or that Roosevelt should have bowed out for someone with more experience, once the war was on?

Moreover, you can't have it both ways. First, the Moore contingent of the Democrats complains that Cheney is the real power behind the throne, that he squirrels away in his secret location, running both the war and the government, while the president sits stupidly in an elementary classroom, reading a book about a goat. He is also the evil genius behind the global conglomerate Halliburton, pulling strings to benefit his boys while plotting to perpetrate a profitable war. Yet, at the same time, according to Kerry, he is unfit to lead (never mind that the head-to-head here is supposed to be Edwards--suggesting that Edwards might be ready for the commander-in-chief's chair is laughable).

If he has already been running the military, the war, and the government, why should anyone be worried that Cheney hasn't put in the requisite four months and twelve days of photo ops, atrocities, secret trips to Cambodia, and injuries to qualify him for the presidency?

Kerry made his military record front and center, virtually asserting no other qualifications. This is his resume. He is asking for the job based on his very short experience in the previous century, in a position far beneath that of commander in chief. Moreover, after leaving that position, he smeared his former co-workers and his bosses, and spent the next 20 years trying to undermine the industry he now asks to be made the leader of.

Substitute "box boy" for "Swift Boat commander" (sorry, John O'Neill; your experience doesn't qualify you, either.) Substitute "CEO" for "Commander-in-chief." If he wanted a top job in industry, he would have to come up with better and more recent credentials. Cheney has proven his mettle in the arena, as has Bush. Bush has served in the position Kerry aspires to gain with his non-experience. Cheney has apprenticed that position, while Edwards was busy suing the medical insurance industry into bankruptcy and driving doctors out of their practices.

On paper, in the business world, there would be no contest.

Unfortunately, we don't vote on paper (well, not after the 2000 elections, at any rate). We vote in our heads, where logic and emotion get all confused with facts and lies. Whether the Kerry camp can rein their man in and get him to stop looking like a girlie man every time someone looks at him cross-eyed remains to be seen.

As the President said, in Texas, they call that swagger "walking." You know who George Bush is as soon as you see him. He says what he thinks, and he doesn't always care what others think. That drives the liberals nuts because they desperately want everyone on the planet to care what they think. It's what gives comfort and sustenance to Hollywood celebrities, the unshakeable conviction that everyone--even the president of the United States--is breathlessly waiting to find out what they think. President Bush takes information, he takes advice, and he listens with compassion. But, in the end, the decision belongs to the authority vested in him as the President of the United States. He knows it, and Senator Kerry needs to show that he at least understands it.

Kerry says he wants more nuance, more sensitivity, more alliances. But we've tried that before, and Al Quaeda interpreted it as a green light to blow things up, and Saddam interpreted it as a green light to thumb his nose at the international community. The kinder, gentler president is the domestic side. And the President's conservative compassion is the progeny of his father's "kinder, gentler nation," with its thousand points of light. But the face we show the emirs and princes and strongmen and dictators and tyrants that actually rule over most of the world's populations must be fierce and unblinking.

On the most important issue of our time, Bush and Cheney don't back down. And Kerry and Edwards blink entirely too much.