The War of the Flip Flops
Both candidates have made their share of course corrections—so why is Kerry seen as the bigger waffler, and how will he fight back?

Consistency is one of those qualities that act like a virtue without necessarily being one. While we would like our Presidents to be consistently wise, it is the wisdom, not the consistency, that we are really after. But consistency and its cousin certainty still hold a sacred place in our politics. The charge that a candidate has flip-flopped on some position is not a political attack so much as a personal one. It is less about the issues being debated than about the instincts being revealed, about honor and honesty and nerve under fire. How tightly the label sticks depends a lot on the impression voters have already formed, which means that a less well-known candidate can be vulnerable in ways a familiar one may not be.

No mission has been more urgent for the Bush-Cheney operation than to seize this moment, in the springtime of the campaign, when all impressions about the challenger are new, to convince voters that John Kerry is an opportunist tethered to no core beliefs, a serial side switcher on everything from the war to gas taxes to gay marriage.

In fact, the very week that President Bush executed a spectacular backflip with a twist, agreeing after weeks of refusal to let National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice testify publicly and under oath before the commission investigating 9/11, the polls suggested that his strategy of painting Kerry as a waffler was working, especially in battleground states, where Kerry's 28% advantage over Bush coming out of the primaries has all but disappeared.

How can a line of fire that is bruising Kerry seem to bounce off Bush? As Kerry's defenders are quick to note, the President had a fairly acrobatic record even before the Condi flip, doubling back on everything from his "humble" foreign policy to steel tariffs, opposing the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance bill and then signing it, calling gay marriage a state issue and then backing a federal ban on it.

If voters seem more inclined to hold Kerry's somersaults against him, it may be because they don't know enough about the Massachusetts Senator to put the charges in context. Any Senator with a 19-year record has cast thousands of votes that can be mined for contradiction. But presidential candidates live on a different planet than lawmakers, who can revise and amend their remarks at will. Thus candidate Kerry denounces greedy companies caught in financial scandals, though Senator Kerry voted to protect them from liability. Candidate Kerry slams Bush for the way he has carried out the No Child Left Behind Act, which Senator Kerry voted for.

Bush, meanwhile, has made a fetish of constancy. He brags that he never revisits a decision or reads a poll. Intellectuals change their minds, he says; leaders know where they are going and act. "Steady leadership in times of change" is his campaign slogan, as though the steadiness is what matters, regardless of the direction in which he is leading. Voters have had plenty of opportunity to take the measure of his convictions, whether it's his commitment to cut taxes or his resolve to take out Saddam Hussein. That has given the President a weird advantage when he decides to change course, as he has on occasion throughout his tenure.

It helps Bush that when he backslides, he is typically shifting to a popular position from an unpopular one. He not only opposed Rice's testifying publicly before the 9/11 commission, on the ground of Executive privilege, but had opposed creation of the commission itself until the pressure from, among others, the victims' families became too hot. Yet any political damage, argues a senior Administration official, is "totally overwhelmed by the fact of her testifying." Bush is allowing another commission to investigate prewar intelligence on Iraq, which he had also opposed, wooing the U.N., which he had derided; and signed the Sarbanes-Oxley corporate-reform bill, which he had resisted. In each case he ended up where a majority of the American public sits.

Kerry reverses himself more subtly, over time and often with an intricate explanation, none of which can fit in a 30-second ad. A wise politician matures, Kerry allies argue. Back in 1988 the Senator opposed requiring a few hours of work by welfare mothers, then in 1996 voted for a Clinton reform bill that required more hours of work. That evolution, Kerry supporters say, just shows how he had come to appreciate the role of work requirements in combatting the culture of poverty. Kerry often claims that circumstances have changed between any given flip and flop.

Kerry's response to Bush is not so much that Bush shifts as that he lies, though Kerry won't say it quite that way. He calls this "the biggest say-one-thing-do-another Administration" ever, and points to the fine print of Bush's budgets to make his case. One ad, now being previewed on Kerry's website but likely to hit airwaves soon, is called "Keep Our Word" and contrasts video of Bush's pledges with details about his actions during his Administration. It features Bush vowing that "my economic-security plan can be summed up in one word—jobs," and the screen flashes the words "2.9 million jobs lost." Bush is shown promising to "make health care affordable and available," and the screen flashes, "3.8 million more Americans lost health insurance." "On issue after issue," Kerry said in a speech in Nevada, "George W. Bush keeps saying one thing to the people, and then doing another big favor for the special interests."

The new Kerry ad aims to use Bush's claim to be a straight talker against him. But because a majority of voters still say they believe Bush is basically honest, Kerry's other play on the consistency front is to make his own faults a virtue, and Bush's virtues a fault. Kerry's allies talk about the sophistication of his thinking, all but drawing the contrast to a President they believe fixes on an idea and will not move off it even when the world around him transforms. "He stubbornly insists on tax cuts as he steadily loses jobs in this country," Kerry says on the stump. "He stubbornly refuses to allow the importation of drugs from Canada, while steadily the prices are going up. I think his stubborn leadership has led America steadily in the wrong direction," he says, winding up. "And that's why we're going to vote for change in November." If Kerry can seize the voters' imagination in this way, says a strategist, everything the Republicans want to make of his various statements on the campaign trail and the hiccups in his voting record won't matter.

As the war of the flip-flops drags on, voters can run a consistency check of their own. Kerry's team will blast Bush for reversing himself on steel tariffs and then charge that he is too stubborn to change. The Bush machine will paint Kerry as an unreconstructed Massachusetts liberal, and then if he claims to be a centrist by citing his past statements challenging affirmative action and teacher tenure and promoting free trade, he'll be back in the Waffle House. But maybe voters won't care much. The only perfectly consistent man, Aldous Huxley noted, is a dead one, and we've yet to elect one of those.

—from TIME, April 12, 2004

Questions

1. On what issues have Kerry and Bush reversed their positions?

2. Why have the charges of flip-flopping caused more damage for Kerry than for Bush?