Which is party of 'strength'?

With a Democratic convention unconventionally dominated by military themes, Sen. John Kerry is taking an aggressive step to shrink the gap between himself and the president on national security - and reverse decades of Republican dominance on that front that has held since the days of the Vietnam War.

In part, the Massachusetts senator has no choice but to make security a cornerstone of his campaign: Polls show that Americans still see Iraq and the war on terror as the top issues concerning the nation, ahead of the economy.

But the Kerry campaign also believes it has a candidate - and a race - uniquely suited to shift the political paradigm. As a Vietnam veteran running against a president who did not go to Vietnam, Kerry is casting himself as better prepared to make decisions about matters of war, a candidate who is both "strong and wise," as Democrats repeatedly noted throughout the week.

"It's a move for the jugular, but on the other hand ... he may not have an option," says Fred Greenstein, a presidential historian at Princeton University.

To this end, Kerry has adopted more hawkish positions than many members of his own party - in some cases trying to get out in front of the president in the muscularity department: He is proposing to add 40,000 troops to the US military, and has put forward a detailed plan to secure loose nuclear material in Russia. He is calling to extend the 9/11 commission's mandate for another 18 months.

At the same time, however, Kerry has sharply criticized Bush for the manner in which he took the country to war - alienating allies and leaving the US to shoulder too much of the burden.

In many ways, Democrats are presenting a Kerry presidency as a return to a consensus-based, less ideological foreign policy: The Bush administration, they say, has pursued a reckless foreign agenda that represents a radical departure from the established framework of the past 50 years, under both Republican and Democratic administrations.

"Bush's main claim to the presidency stems from his self-appointment as the war president of this country, and therefore the question is very relevant - namely is he an appropriate war leader?" says Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security adviser under President Carter. "One way to deal with that is to go at it head on. His foreign policy represents the repudiation of 55 years of bipartisanship in foreign policy when it comes to national security."

Republicans say that Kerry is pinning all of his national-security credentials on service in a war that happened more than three decades ago - and that his two-decade-long record on security issues in the Senate is hardly reassuring. They point out that he voted against nearly every major weapons system during the cold war, voted against the 1991 Gulf War, and, while he voted in favor of the current Iraq war, voted against the $87 billion in funding for it.

Page: 1 | 2