Finally, a message

I'm happy to see that John Kerry finall seems to have found a message to run with in this campaign. I wouldn't call myself a fan of Kerry, I'm largely in the Anybody But Bush crowd, but the Kerry campaign's performance has been lackluster at best until this point. Andrew Sullivan, someone who was for the war in Iraq, has a great piece up at The New Republic, talking about the situation in Iraq, and the political hay that Kerry can make of it, if the Bush administration doesn't start changing what they're saying/doing soon.

But the reality is unavoidable: Large swathes of Iraq have been ceded to terrorist insurgents; the multinational force is deeply unpopular in all the surveys of the general population you can read; barely a fraction of reconstruction funds has been spent; military and civilian casualties continue to rise; parts of Baghdad are not secure; the chances of national elections in January look iffy in the extreme; the White House's own internal reports are full of gloom. None of this was discussed at the Republican National Convention, and you can understand why. But the extremely rosy picture of Iraq sketched by that convention could well become a liability if the facts on the ground begin to make the commander-in-chief seem culpably out of it at best, and deceptive at worst.