Kerry Urged to Dodge Foreign Policy (Updated)

Anyone who wins a primary election deserves serious consideration for the presidency, even if they don’t get my vote in the end. The “hawkish case for John Kerry” will not be easy to write, but I feel I owe it to him all the same. He may or may not deserve my vote, but he does deserve a little mental effort and attention.
I’m in the middle of compiling my list of points for that argument. It isn’t easy, especially since the Kerry campaign can’t even convince itself.
Here’s the New York Times:

President Bush roared out of his New York convention last week, leaving many Democrats nervous about the state of the presidential race and pressing Senator John Kerry to torque up what they described as a wandering and low-energy campaign.
In interviews, leading Democrats – governors, senators, fund-raisers and veteran strategists – said they had urged Mr. Kerry’s campaign aides to concentrate almost exclusively on challenging President Bush on domestic issues from here on out, saying he had spent too much of the summer on national security, Mr. Bush’s strongest turf. [Emphasis added.]

I have no idea, really, why the Democrats did not see this coming. There were some liberal hawks on the primary ticket that could have neutralized this from the get-go.
I didn’t vote for George W. Bush in 2000. It’s been a royal pain to defend this president from his worst critics while my heart hasn’t been in it. And it’s going to be just as difficult to “carry water” for John Kerry when his own staff and his own self can’t even cobble together an argument to convince defense hawks that he’s a safe bet. I really don’t think a Kerry presidency would be as disastrous as many Republicans are saying. He is no Dennis Kucinich. Still, no one would ever photoshop something like this to make fun of Joe Lieberman.

Image via Fark.
UPDATE: Some people in the comments take issue with the picture above because when John Kerry said he would fight a more “sensitive” war he did not mean he would be more sensitive to our enemies. Rather, he meant he would be more “sensitive” to Europeans. True enough, but “sensitive war” is an asinine thing to say in any context. War is a horror by nature, and the only things less sensitive are totalitarian oppression and genocide.
Besides, as “Bill” pointed out in the comments, Kerry has already referred to the Iraq coalition as “fraudulent.” That was not a very “sensitive” thing to say about Britain and Tony Blair, not to mention everybody else who is an actual rather than a would-be ally of the United States.
Only in a child’s fantasy universe did France oppose regime-change in Iraq because Bush was insufficiently “sensitive.” If John Kerry actually believes he can get Jacques Chirac into the American orbit by being “sensitive” he doesn’t know the first thing about French foreign policy since Charles de Gaulle. He’ll learn if he is elected, but the political education of John Kerry is still somewhere off in the future.