On Sunday morning, I had a few free minutes and was browsing through a (paper) copy of the New York Times Magazine, which had a long article about John Kerry.

I didn't think it was a particularly flattering, or a particularly good article, but there was one thing I liked a lot about it, and that is exactly what George Bush has been attacking. I fear that instead of defending the message and clarifying it, Kerry will instead work to disavow it:

"When I asked Kerry what it would take for Americans to feel safe again, he displayed a much less apocalyptic worldview [than Bush]. 'We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance,' Kerry said. 'As a former law-enforcement person, I know we're never going to end prostitution. We're never going to end illegal gambling. But we're going to reduce it, organized crime, to a level where it isn't on the rise. It isn't threatening people's lives every day, and fundamentally, it's something that you continue to fight, but it's not threatening the fabric of your life.'"

I loved this quote. It stands in stark contrast to the republican point of view which says that as long as there is any terrorism in the world, we must live in fear, we must give up our civil liberties. Any moment anywhere, some terrorist may strike, and because of this, we must put up with never-ending military conflict, our emails will be read, our organizations will be infiltrated, and our library books will be scrutinized. Forever.

"This analogy struck me as remarkable, if only because it seemed to throw down a big orange marker between Kerry's philosophy and the president's. Kerry, a former prosecutor, was suggesting that the war, if one could call it that, was, if not winnable, then at least controllable. If mobsters could be chased into the back rooms of seedy clubs, then so, too, could terrorists be sent scurrying for their lives into remote caves where they wouldn't harm us. Bush had continually cast himself as the optimist in the race, asserting that he alone saw the liberating potential of American might, and yet his dark vision of unending war suddenly seemed far less hopeful than Kerry's notion that all of this horror -- planes flying into buildings, anxiety about suicide bombers and chemicals in the subway -- could somehow be made to recede until it was barely in our thoughts."

But Bush is fighting back against this vision, one of the most hopeful things I've heard a politician (besides Dennis Kucinich) say for a while now. He says that it's "naive and dangerous", and a republican campaign advisor casts it as a view of fighting terrorism that is like law enforcement, "You wait until such time as there's damage and tragedy that visits your shores and then you investigate it like a law enforcement effort."

No. That's not what he said. He said that terrorism must not forever be the focus of our lives. That it is indeed impossible to get rid of it completely (as Bush himself has said), but that doesn't mean that we must go on living forever in fear, as Bush would have us live.

I hope that the republicans who are backing Bush on this one will come to realize the bleak future he would inflict on us: a life lived in fear.

Ironically, the article also says, "After months of having his every word scrutinized by reporters and mocked by Republicans, Kerry appeared to sense danger in the most mundane of places." referring to the authors' own sense of what it is like to interview Kerry. It was painfully obvious as I was reading it that the author was spewing out pointless commentary about exactly the kinds of things that the media and republicans would latch onto, such as the brand of bottled water Kerry prefers. It was almost a self-fulfilling prophesy.

Comments? email me.

Some more choice quotes for anyone who doesn't get around to reading the article (you should):

...through his BCCI investigation, Kerry did discover that a wide array of international criminals -- Latin American drug lords, Palestinian terrorists, arms dealers -- had one thing in common: they were able to move money around through the same illicit channels. And he worked hard, and with little credit, to shut those channels down.

In 1988, Kerry successfully proposed an amendment that forced the Treasury Department to negotiate so-called Kerry Agreements with foreign countries. Under these agreements, foreign governments had to promise to keep a close watch on their banks for potential money laundering or they risked losing their access to U.S. markets. Other measures Kerry tried to pass throughout the 90's, virtually all of them blocked by Republican senators on the banking committee, would end up, in the wake of 9/11, in the USA Patriot Act; among other things, these measures subject banks to fines or loss of license if they don't take steps to verify the identities of their customers and to avoid being used for money laundering.

[...]

In other words, Kerry was among the first policy makers in Washington to begin mapping out a strategy to combat an entirely new kind of enemy. Americans were conditioned, by two world wars and a long standoff with a rival superpower, to see foreign policy as a mix of cooperation and tension between civilized states. Kerry came to believe, however, that Americans were in greater danger from the more shadowy groups he had been investigating -- nonstate actors, armed with cellphones and laptops -- who might detonate suitcase bombs or release lethal chemicals into the subway just to make a point. They lived in remote regions and exploited weak governments. Their goal wasn't to govern states but to destabilize them.

[...]

Many of Bush's advisers spent their careers steeped in cold-war strategy, and their foreign policy is deeply rooted in the idea that states are the only consequential actors on the world stage, and that they can -- and should -- be forced to exercise control over the violent groups that take root within their borders.

[...]

no one state, acting alone, can possibly have much impact on the threat, because terrorists will always be able to move around, shelter their money and connect in cyberspace; there are no capitals for a superpower like the United States to bomb, no ambassadors to recall, no economies to sanction.

[...]

Such a theory suggests that, in our grief and fury, we have overrated the military threat posed by Al Qaeda, paradoxically elevating what was essentially a criminal enterprise, albeit a devastatingly sophisticated and global one, into the ideological successor to Hitler and Stalin -- and thus conferring on the jihadists a kind of stature that might actually work in their favor, enabling them to attract more donations and more recruits.