E.J. Dionne this morning explores the bizarro campaign of George Bush, who has flip-flopped: after spending so much time trying to point out the differences between John Kerry and himself, he’s now trying to show how similar they are. Why? Because Bush is rated so low on Iraq and national security, he figures that he should portray Kerry as also in that pit with him.
In other words, the reason you shouldn’t vote for Bush is also the reason you shouldn’t vote for Kerry.
That man is a genius.
From the days after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, until very recently, Bush and his surrogates emphasized how much tougher Bush was than his opponents. Unlike the Democrats, Bush was willing to “go it alone” to battle terror. He was not prepared to wait for support from the United Nations and recalcitrant allies — “to wait,” as Bush himself once put it, “for somebody else to act.”
Bush has now reversed both the public emphasis of his policy and the rhetoric of his campaign. A new phrase has entered the lexicon of Bush surrogates: Where Kerry was once denounced primarily as a wildly liberal senator from Massachusetts and a flip-flopper to boot, he is now accused of “me-tooism” on Iraq.
… Bush’s drop in the polls and Kerry’s rise were fueled in large part by mounting violence in Iraq earlier this year, a strong public reaction against the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and a belief that the administration had planned poorly for the occupation on the basis of dangerously optimistic assumptions. The Bush campaign’s argument now amounts to a claim that Kerry would do no better.
