Are any Americans really taken in by this garbage?

'Senator John Edwards has hailed John Kerry as a decisive and strong leader in a keynote speech to the Democrats' convention in Boston...In keeping with a key theme of the convention, the vice-presidential candidate spoke of Mr Kerry's experience in Vietnam as proof of his ability to be a wartime leader. Mr Kerry's crewmates had seen him save another's life, turn his boat around and "drive it straight through an enemy position and chase down the enemy to save his crew", Mr Edwards said. US veterans of the war in Iraq "deserve a president who understands... on the most personal level what they have gone through", he said.'

The relentless pounding of military metaphors, complete with Kerry being pictured yesterday against the backdrop of gun turrets (subtle, huh?), is such an obvious, indeed desperate, propaganda ploy to present him as something he is not -- strong and decisive, and therefore a staunch war leader. But the truth is that, on the contrary, Kerry is dangerously inconsistent and opportunistic, as Gerard Baker devastatingly reminds us in the Times:

'He was a strong voice in favour of free trade for years, but now says he would reconsider open trade deals with other countries. He voted against war in Iraq in 1991, after Saddam Hussein’s tanks had stormed through an American ally’s territory. But he voted in favour of war in 2002, on the controversial ground of pre-emptive need. Most damagingly of all (according even to some of his own advisers), having voted for the 2002 war resolution, less than a year later he voted against a measure to give the necessary $87billion funding to finance continued military operations there. His explanation, like all fateful cover-ups through history, was worse than the original crime: “I actually did vote for the $87billion before I voted against it,” he said.

'On social issues, Mr Kerry has strongly supported abortion rights, but, as a Catholic of sorts, has also professed his own conviction that life begins at conception. He has supported affirmative action, but warned people of the damage it can do to social cohesion. He wants better relations with allies, but will ignore them if he feels it necessary. Nothing captures Mr Kerry’s ambivalence on the great issues of the day for a puzzled electorate as much as this simple fact: he was both a Vietnam war hero and one of the leading members of the antiwar movement.'

Baker charitably ascribes all this to genuine intellectual doubt rather than opportunism. Whatever his motives, however, Kerry's vacillations bespeak a character flaw which would be disturbing in a leader at any time, but in a period of such global peril might well prove lethal.