Have any of you tried talking to people who have managed to allow all the disasters of Bush's adventure in Iraq to wash over them, who continue to maintain that Iraq is the major event in the transcendent issue of the day, the war against terror, despite the daily recounting of how things turn out in this war never fit with what the Bushies said was coming or why?
I have, and here's what I've found: reasons and arguments act as cover for something deeper, something psychologically and emotionally more primitive, a feeling that must be defended no matter what offenses to reasons are incurred. No WMD and no Osama connections? So far! they'll tell you, a classic of a non-falsifiable argument or they'll clutch at one of those straws the likes of Cheney keep vouching for. No pointing out that the country invaded had neither attacked us nor had the means to, by proxy or alone, shakes the core belief that the invasion was justified. That justiification is a feeling, finally, something which so passionately rings true, the arguments pro and con are just flapdoodle second-tier noise.
The emotion beneath that rules is fear. Let me draw an analogy you may remember: In 1992 a Japanese exchange student named Yoshihiro Hattori was shot to death in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Dressed as John Travaolta, he and a friend went to the wrong house looking for a Halloween party. Apparently, the woman answering the door was frightened by him. Her husband, Rodney Pearis responded by appearing at the door with a loaded pistol and when the Yoshihiro failed to understand the command "Freeze", Pearis shot him.
Pearis was found innocent of murder at a trial attended by Yoshi's parents and widely followed in Japan. This verdict meant that to Pearis's peers and to the legal institutions of Louisiana Pearis's reaction made sense. It was something they judged a reasonable person might justifiably do when faced with confusion and foreigness at his doorstep. Pearis, they concluded, had a reasonable fear for his life and safety.
It is fair, I think, to regard the Pearis case--his actions and his acquittal--as a product of the cultural strain in America among whose most prominent beliefs is the need to have firearms at the ready to protect one's wife and children, a point of view which believes in the imminent threat of random violence in everday life (which is the operative characteristic of terror), and feels itself justified at responding preemptively to the threat.
It is my hypothesis that if you mapped the part of the American population which agreed with the Pearis jury and the part which believes in the conflation of 9-11 and the attack on Iraq as part of a greater whole which defines the current national purpose, you would get something like a 90% overlap.
These Americans are operating on fear, reinforced by the tropes of Bush Administration thinking and propaganda. Reasoned argument no more satisfies these fears than a menu satisfies hunger. How can the Democratic Presidential candidacy hope to influence these voters?
The answer is reassurance. John Kerry must not just talk the talk of reassurance, he must embody it. It was not just FDR's brilliant words that galvinized Americans' hopes to find a way out of the Depression--"the only thing we have to fear is fear itself--nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror"--it was paternal optimism, the sense parents can convey via example that everything is going to be all right.
This is not John Kerry's long suit--though when his band of brothers took center stage in Iowa it was their emotional witness to this quality in Kerry that turned his candidacy around.
This is, however, precisely Wes Clark's strength: he can convey military reassurance with a depth that far outstrips any other major political figure.
More than choosing a running mate for reasons of geographical diversity, Kerry should choose his vp to make a statement that goes to the heart of the fear that otherwise paralyzes American voters into following George Bush.
In fact, he can even take a page from another candidate for president running in wartime: Eisenhower, whose whose 1952 promise to go to Korea in the midst of that war spoke to American anxiety as no foreign policy doctrine or criticism could have. "I'll take care of it."
John Kerry should choose Wes Clark as his running mate and tell the American electorate that he will send Clark to Iraq when he enters the White House.