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Monday, September 06, 2004

Caught between Iraq and and a hard place

John Kerry, that is. An interesting observation from the World Socialist Web Site:
There is the sharpest contrast between the ruthlessness of the Bush campaign and the impotence and half-heartedness of Kerry and the Democrats. Kerry himself made no explicit response to Zell Miller’s vicious speech, and his running mate John Edwards contented himself with a limp comment that the Republican convention had offered “hate” while the Democrats were offering “hope.”

Kerry’s spinelessness is bound up with the fact that there are many potential Zell Millers in the Democratic Party establishment. Another prominent Democrat, former New York mayor Ed Koch, also spoke from the Republican convention platform on Wednesday to urge a vote for Bush.

Kerry has solidarized himself with the invasion and occupation of Iraq because, whatever tactical differences might exist, the consensus within the American ruling elite is fully in favor of a strategy of US global hegemony, and the Democratic Party is, no less than the Republican Party, an instrument of American imperialism. But were Kerry, as an electoral maneuver, to veer significantly from his pro-war stance, he would face defections to the Bush camp by pro-war Democratic officeholders like Joseph Lieberman, and public attack by the likes of Joseph Biden and Bill and Hillary Clinton.