Justin Raphael: Kerry's contradictions hard to ignore

John Kerry talks a lot about how the American people were publicly, and he personally, misled by President Bush and his administration. Yet just a few weeks after Kerry became their presumptive nominee, Democrats are the ones who should feel misled -- by Kerry himself.

In primary after primary, voters expressed their faith that the senior senator from Massachusetts was the only candidate with the mettle to challenge an increasingly vulnerable president and withstand his "attack machine." Kerry's Silver Stars and his years in the Senate seemed, to the unscrupulous eye, to spell gravitas, that most overused and overestimated of political labels. His dully cadenced victory speeches were, at least, delivered in a sound and confident voice, one which contrasted with an increasingly suspect presidential tenor.

Kerry wondered, with many of us, about the WMD, the National Guard dental records and the jobs promised by the National Council of Economic Advisers. The former naval officer stared across the political bow and told the floundering ship of state to "Bring it on!"

And as the senator predicted, the administration did understand those words. Bush, Rove and Co. went on the air with a liberal paintbrush, declaring Senator Kerry weak on defense and in favor of raising both taxes and spending. What we have discovered in this communicative blitzkrieg is that Kerry was not quite the steady helm we thought him to be.

It is true that the president's administration has a sort of Platonic relationship with the facts, holding on to its vision of a meta-world where such trifles as WMD or real budget estimates do not matter. But if Bush makes decisions before a reckoning with factual context, this at least gives him the veneer of a committed, confident leader, whereas Kerry seems bent only on contextualizing his decisions.

I admire the senator for fighting back; he has to. The problem is that Kerry has felt the need to give his party the appearance that he has opposed Bush even when he has agreed with him. Hence, he has taken the position that apparent discrepancies between his record and his current positions are merely the product of changed circumstance. Kerry must be for and against the landmark No Child Left Behind Act and the PATRIOT Act, so he explains that he voted for them under a different pretext than that in which the administration has implemented them, as if he were blindsided across the head with an executive branch.

Kerry also has to be for and against Bush's foreign policy, so he claims the president violated an almost personal pledge to go to the United Nations and craft a plan for peace, not to mention promises about WMD. The Bush administration has shamefully distorted this wavering to ascribe to Kerry the absurd belief that the United States shouldn't control its own security.

However, after supporting the war resolution, Kerry did vote against funding the troops on the grounds that the funds could not be offset by raising taxes. The senator clearly justified his vote this way: "I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it."

While for the reasoned leader, changes in opinion are possible and perhaps necessary, Kerry's contradictions are too numerous and too serious to be deflected as products of the nuance Bush lacks. The president's ignorance of the truth is troubling and dangerous, but what Kerry has forgotten in only a few weeks is what it means to be the strong leader I believe he is.

We expect great leaders to not only consider the facts, but to anticipate their unintended consequences, to have insight as well as some degree of foresight. Explaining away his decisions contextually is a tacit admission that Kerry is not entirely comfortable with making them, for if politicians like Kerry are no longer responsible for seeing down the roads of war and peace the consequences we cannot, it is hard to imagine why we need them.

After all, is a decision without context truly a decision? Without the balancing of what seems to be with the risks of what might be, what is there to decide? To be fair, the Bush administration has been short on the facts. But in a world of rapidly changing circumstances, a decision based on anything but a weighing of present inclinations against future considerations is merely an affirmation of the obvious -- and let us not be so humble as to think we would need Congress for that.

Reagan was the great communicator; his prot‚g‚ Bush appears bent on being a great crusader. Yet so far, Kerry has been little more than a great contextualizer or a great complicator. I do think John Kerry is tough and smart enough to be president, and if he is both, he will decide exactly what he believes is important enough to be tough about and stick to it.

But as long as he feels that enough "bring it ons", hockey, snowboarding, motorcycles or Bronze Stars will enable him to grit his teeth through contradictions, Kerry will be living no less a myth than the administration he seeks to replace.

Justin Raphael is a sophomore American history major from Westport, Conn. Uncommon Sense appears on Tuesdays.

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