Old Newsweek

I like lounging around the house and reading whatever is laying around. Today, I've been perusing Newsweek magazines from the last couple of months. The most interesting articles were Fareed Zakaria's article on the election and an article about Bob Dylan. The election article talks about how we are in the first foreign policy election since 1960. Recently, the democrats have been whining about how the election came down to moral values...but I think they are wrong. The election was about foreign policy and the war and in order for Kerry to win, he needed to demonstrate how he would do a better job on the war. He didn't. In the article, Zakaria listed three questions that each candidate must answer:

1. Define the war
2. Define success in the war
3. Explain how your policies will best ensure success

Bush defines the war well. He does not define success well - he says, democracy in Iraq - which is too broad and hard to measure. His policies seem very vulnerable and do not seem to be achieving the broad definition of success.

On the other hand, we have Kerry, who in my opinion, never really was able to define the war. And this goes for the entire democratic party, who offers decent criticisms to Bush's idea of the war, but cannot define it for themselves.

The sooner we recognize this is why the election was lost, the sooner we will be able to regroup and be a serious political force.