ELECTABILITY ISN'T SUBSTANCE:

The new target: How would the White House attack John Forbes Kerry? (Lexington, Jan 29th 2004, The Economist)

Mr Rove has an embarrassment of riches when it comes to tagging the senator as a tax-and-spend paleoliberal who believes in coddling drug addicts, abolishing the death penalty and protecting partial-birth abortion. Mr Kerry has offended against Americans' God-given right to cheap petrol by advocating a 50-cent increase on the tax on it; he has also called for steep cuts in funding for the FBI and restrictions on the CIA.

The fact that this is Rovan demagogy doesn't make it any less damaging. Besides, the second avenue of attack is that Mr Kerry has been a little too political himself, seldom showing the same mettle in internal Democratic politics that he did in the jungles of Vietnam. Whenever he has summoned up the courage to challenge the party's leftish interest groups—by questioning affirmative action, for example, or taking on the teachers' unions—he has always retreated in the end. His current stump speech panders to his party's worst instincts on everything from drug prices to American business moving jobs abroad. For all his faults, Bill Clinton shifted the Democratic Party's centre of gravity on free trade, and law and order. So far Mr Kerry has left no footprints in the Democratic snow.

The third avenue of attack is that Mr Kerry is a blue-blooded elitist who doesn't understand ordinary people. He is the richest man in a Senate full of rich people: a Boston Brahmin (his middle name is Forbes) who married an heiress and went to a Swiss boarding school. Of course, his fellow Skull and Bones man, Mr Bush, can hardly claim that he was born on the wrong side of the tracks. But many Americans get much more riled about elitist liberals than they do about elitist Republicans—particularly if those liberals embrace the teachers' unions while sending their own children to private schools, or go soft on crime while making sure that they live in the safest bits of town. Add to this Mr Kerry's haughty style, and you can see the makings of a populist caricature.

What precisely is the substance? Off the top of your head can you name one thing that Mr. Kerry wants to change--other than the regime?

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 30, 2004 4:30 PM