Kerry Invades NYU

So, John Kerry made an appearance at New York University today. Of course, it’s not as if the general NYU community was, say, made aware of it. Those who carefully scan the NYU LiveJournal community might have known about it.

But even knowing about it might not have made a difference for those who wanted to go. As seems to be more and more common with political outings, the audience was carefully screened for compliance and agreement, not the chance for a legitimate discussion of ideas.

In a move reminiscent of the Republican Loyalty Oath, in order to be put on the ticket list for the event, you had to be on the College Democrats mailing list.

So if for some reason you happened to not be registered with the College Democrats, you were S.O.L. if you just wanted to see the Democratic presidential nominee.

Since I’m most decidedly not a registered College Democrat (or College Republican, I’m a staunch independent), of course I was not able to actually, say, attend the event. But I’ll be talking to those who did in the next day, so stay tuned for that. Today, you get my deconstruction of Kerry’s speech.

Well, if you didn’t actually know any better, you would have thought that the only subject of importance this election was Iraq. By my count, the word “Iraq” or “Iraqis” appeared 88 times in the speech. Oh, and Senator Kerry, do you think the President might have, say, been wrong about Iraq? The word “wrong” showed up nine times, and “mistake” and “error” three times each.

As you might gather, I found it a bit odd that in a speech before 300 or so college students, the only topic was Iraq and the War on Terrorism. While certainly an important issue to many voters, I can’t imagine that Kerry hopes to win the young vote solely on the slight differences between his and President Bush’s foreign policies. Kerry advocates a continued War on Terrorism, saying “In fighting the war on terrorism, my principles are straight forward. The terrorists are beyond reason. We must destroy them. As president, I will do whatever it takes, as long as it takes, to defeat our enemies.” I can’t imagine President Bush would argue with that.

The only real difference I can see is that Kerry makes some claims about involving our allies, such as they are, in the rebuilding process. He says that “we cannot hope to succeed unless we rebuild and lead strong alliances so that other nations share the burden with us,” but his only real suggestion as to how we should assuage the hurt feelings of our former allies in Europe is to allow them a stake in Iraq’s oil resources. Of course, Iraq might just need those resources so that they can rebuild their shattered infrastructure, but who’s counting?

Finally, I found it disheartening that a good 85% of the text was devoted to telling everyone just how wrong President Bush was to go to war in Iraq, while trying to avoid blame for having voted for the war. Only in the last bit of the speech does Kerry offer anything but “they were wrong.” Ok, so his proposals might or might not be good, but it does lead credence to those who say this election is more about a referendum on the president, and not a vote of confidence in John Kerry.