SHUT UP AND START TALKING!

I respect Josh Chafetz's views immensely, but I disagree strongly with this post. Granting for a minute that Josh is right in describing Kerry's motives (which I'm not sure about; see the last paragraph): especially in the strange contemporary electoral institution that is the permanent campaign, candidate rhetorical dodges are to be expected. Framing counts for a lot. And if you want to win, you had better know how to do it.

It's really not all that hard to tell what candidates think on "the issues": just go to their web site and / or listen to a stump speech or two. There's no real secret there. In fact, much of what passes as media chatter about issues is really part of the media strategies of the campaigns themselves. In a long campaign, as Thomas Patterson noted a decade back, the issues get boring for reporters; they feel like they have to tell a horse race story, and one aspect of that story concerns the dodges and thrusts that campaigns throw at each other. Candidates themselves use the dodges and thrusts to keep the media attention, to keep "momentum," to attempt to frame issues in ways that they prefer or that they think will harm their opponents. I'm fine with that. Particular instances of framing may annoy me, but the phenomenon itself is entirely understandable given the process of the modern campaign.

As far as I can tell, none of the candidates are refraining from discussing policy altogether. We know pretty much what any of the Democratic candidates would do with respect to Iraq (neither Kerry nor Edwards would pull out; both would seek greater U.N. involvement; both would learn from the negative example of the current administration's poor post-war planning, and both would be skeptical about the broad goals of transforming the middle east through military means). And despite Republican attempts to frame the terrorism issue as one of a choice between weak Democratic reliance on the criminal justice system and strong Republican leadership in international affairs, no serious candidate will withdraw precipitously from military action against international terrorist groups, and no serious candidate thinks that terrorism can only be fought with the courts (just as no serious candidate thinks that terrorism can be fought without recourse to the judicial system). None of the serious candidates can be described as systematically avoiding foreign policy and terrorism issues.

Finally, I'm a bit confused as to why Josh describes Kerry's comments here as a "slimy" attempt to avoid those issues. Or does he really think that Saxby Chambliss is interested in a policy debate? If you want a real policy debate, then at least talk in detail about particular Senate votes and the particular nature of the legislative process in the Senate, instead of merely peddling the predictable "soft on defense" line. One could just as easily say that the "soft on defense" line itself is a "slimy" dodge that avoids grappling with the hard questions of whether or not the Bush administration's particular policies are headed in the right direction. Same goes for Bush's mendacious framing of the issue as one of lily-livered Democrats who want to prosecute rather than fight terrorists. Those are attempts to win the game. Fair enough. And if that were all the candidates did, there would be no reason to vote for any of them. Luckily, candidates do much more than engage in rhetorical jousting matches.