MB Civic

By Joan Vennochi  |  June 15, 2006 |  The Boston Globe

WHY IS IT so hard to believe John Kerry?

The Massachusetts senator is finally taking the antiwar position that people who know him well expected him to embrace long ago. The position is welcome, if long overdue; unfortunately, it doesn’t dispel doubts about the thinking that got him to this place.

Kerry now labels his 2002 vote to authorize the Iraq invasion a mistake and is calling for US troop withdrawal by the end of the year. His position — for now — is as crisp today as it was meandering during the last presidential campaign.

Had he taken such a clear stand in 2004, he might be in the White House. Remember, George W. Bush’s convictions on war and miscellaneous matters ended up as an advantage on Election Day. Kerry’s penchant to finesse everything, especially war, helped create the flip-flopping caricature depicted in the Bush campaign ads.

As he moves toward a second presidential bid, Kerry continues to pay a price for the straddles, calculations, and parsings of 2004. It’s going to take time and a lot of plain talking to overcome the excruciating equivocations from his previous performance as presidential nominee.

Overcoming skepticism about Kerry’s change of heart on Iraq will be especially challenging. For one thing, it tracks nicely with the general public’s change of heart and coincides conveniently with the liberals’ search for an antiwar champion. In addition, the antiwar fervor that Kerry displayed this week also coincides with an early poll from Iowa that puts John Edwards in first place with Democrats in that presidential caucus state.

The two former running mates now seem to be vying for the antiwar political left. Edwards, the former senator from North Carolina, flatly labeled his vote for war “a mistake” in a November 2005 opinion piece for The Washington Post. In October 2005, Kerry expressed regret about the vote, telling an audience at Georgetown University, “I understand that as much as we might wish it, we can’t rewind the tape of history.” In that Georgetown speech, Kerry also opted for a middle ground between advocating an immediate drawdown of troops and the Bush administration’s refusal to set a timetable: “The way forward in Iraq isnot to pull out precipitously or merely promise to stay `as long as it takes.’ We must instead simultaneously pursue both a political settlement and the withdrawal of American combat forces,” he said then.

Kerry has moved further left since that time, along with one wing of the Democratic Party. At the “Take Back America” conference in Washington this week, liberal activists cheered him for setting a deadline for troop withdrawal. They booed Senator Hillary Clinton of New York for arguing against it.

American voters once accepted the concept of a “new Nixon,” sending Richard M. Nixon to the White House in 1968 after rejecting him narrowly in 1960. So it’s possible that voters could embrace a “new Kerry,” although the memory of the old one is still fresh enough to raise questions in a voter’s mind.

The new Kerry’s problem isn’t a change of heart on the Iraq invasion. Public sentiment reflects a similar shift and a desire to focus on ending the conflict, not endlessly second-guessing the decision to start it.

The new Kerry’s problem is the need to overcome skepticism about his motives from the very start.

Did he vote to authorize the Iraq invasion in the first place because he did not want to run for president in 2004 as an antiwar candidate? Is he repudiating the vote and war now because he wants to run as an antiwar candidate in 2008?

On one hand, you want to believe in the Vietnam veteran who testified famously in 1971 before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, asking, “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?” On the other hand, it’s hard to imagine that veteran taking so long to call the current war a mistake. What was he thinking back in 2002 when he cast a vote to send American troops to die, again, for a mistake? Did he forget about them because he was thinking only of himself and what he believed the voters wanted to hear? Hillary Clinton faces a version of the same question.

Kerry’s painful repositioning on Iraq raises some tough political questions: Is this too little, too late — or better late than never?

But the toughest question Kerry faces isn’t about war, it’s about credibility.