“I’m sorry, you want us to ask the President for a plan?”
If John Kerry is elected, this is what he will be up against for the next four years. The country is facing some difficult, desperate challenges and he will have to disillusion the public and the press of the idea that these challenges have easy, simple solutions, all while trying to keep them from becoming wholly disillusioned.
Achieving the least bad outcome in Iraq will involve military and diplomatic miracles, but the end result will still be dissatisfying – not the sort of thing to be celebrated with ticker tape parades and aircraft carrier landings. Getting the country out of debt will involve paying the bills. (There’s no magical, 4-Point Plan for balancing the budget in six months either.)
Kerry has refrained from offering shallow, impossible promises that these tasks will be easy – even when the press has begged him to make such promises and chided him for not doing so. That’s part of why I’m proud to be voting for him.