Kerry still has work to do

The data supporting the prevailing consensus that John Kerry won last Thursday's debate seem clear enough. An ABC poll found that 45 percent of registered voters thought Kerry had performed better in the debate, compared to 36 percent who chose President Bush as the winner. A CBS poll claimed a more decisive victory for Kerry, with "uncommitted" voters favoring the senator by a margin of 43 to 28 percent.

There is no obvious way to explain these results because the debates held few real surprises. The president was characteristically inarticulate, but he was clear in stating the conviction that has already become a familiar mantra of his campaign: "I believe in the transformational power of liberty. I believe that a free Iraq is in this nation's interests."

Meanwhile, the dominant chord Sen. Kerry struck throughout the debate—"we need to rebuild our alliances"— added nothing new to the Democratic ticket's rhetorical repertoire.

So if the candidates remained firmly in character and stuck to a mostly familiar script, how did Kerry distinguish himself? How did Bush's "resolve" begin to look more and more like "intransigence"? How did Kerry's "indecision" suddenly became reinterpretable as "flexibility"? Is this just an illusion, or is it a genuinely viable way of re-conceptualizing the differences between the candidates? And whatever it is, will it last?

As one possible starting point for thinking about these questions, I will offer my own gloss on Kerry's surprising performance last Thursday.

Let me begin by suggesting that the best that can be said of President Bush is that his decision to go to war in Iraq was highly imaginative. Whatever else it is, the war in Iraq represents an approach to foreign policy marked by a willingness to imagine a dramatically transformed world. There was nothing status-quo-embracing about the decision to oust Saddam Hussein. The president imagined what the world might be like if Iraq were free and then set out to create the better world he'd imagined.

Not enough is said for the importance of imagination in politics — for the ability to conceive and construct potential realities dramatically different from the present state of affairs. Throughout the campaign, I've been troubled by a sneaking suspicion that what Kerry really wants is to simply rein America in. The implication seemed to be that the Kerry solution was to just stop imagining ways in which we can do something daring and worthwhile on a global scale. Kerry's stump-line, "We can do better," always sounded to me like "We can do less."

But in Thursday's debate, Kerry finally showed signs of moving toward a more imaginative discussion of the good that a Kerry presidency can accomplish. Kerry continues to harp on the President's "loss of credibility" in the world, but now there is a twist. Kerry is beginning to show an interest in telling us what he actually intends to do with the international credibility that he thinks his administration will enjoy. Kerry seems finally to get at least this much: it isn't enough for him to say, "Let's placate our allies"; he must also show us why those alliances are necessary to help us instantiate the best sort of world we can imagine.

Kerry still has far to go. His newfound willingness to envision the good that can be achieved under American leadership is still underdeveloped. He seems to think that his ascendancy to the Presidency will, in and of itself, have a miraculous transformative effect. When he promises a "fresh start," he talks as though the world has a Reboot button that he can press at will. He suggests that the mere fact of his election will magically convince countries like Germany and France to reverse their positions on sending troops to Iraq. Are we really to believe that the typical European can't stand the idea of fighting for George W. Bush but can't wait to fight for John Kerry?

Political imagination means anything but a belief in mystical transformations. Kerry needs to talk less about the enigmatic magic of a "fresh start" and talk more concretely about the sort of world that a "fresh start" can make possible. Kerry's success in last week's debate is, at best, a modest first step. He has shown us that he is not hopelessly unimaginative. Now he needs to show us what his imagination can come up with.