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He has to do that even if it means abandoning his current position, says Zogby. "He's going to have to change, because that's where his voters are at."
And if the trend toward red-state disenchantment with the war continues, Kerry could even pick up votes from Bush backers. A recent Wall Street Journal/NBC poll showed that a remarkable 40 percent of Republicans said they would consider voting for Kerry if the war situation worsened.
Zogby criticizes Kerry's current position as outdated. In his April 30 speech, says Zogby, "he called for a solution from 15 months ago, saying, 'We've got to get our allies involved, we've got to bring the United Nations in. Well, you're not going to persuade Germany and France to come in now. You're not going to persuade the United Nations to get involved now."
But Kerry can't make a really radical move and call for withdrawal, Zogby says. "He can't declare, 'Let's cut and run right now,' because that's tantamount to George McGovern," Zogby says. The White House attack machine has already portrayed Kerry as a spineless flip-flopper: If Kerry were to change his position on Iraq, Republicans would crucify him.
So what should his message be? That Bush is a "miserable failure," says Zogby, and we need to "extricate ourselves from this tragic mistake. We need an Arab summit, we need to build bridges back with all of our allies. There's no easy solution."
Essentially, Zogby is arguing that Kerry should start talking about exit strategy -- that he should offer voters the prospect of ending the war, even if that prospect remains vague.
The fact that Kerry can't offer a quick way out of the war might seem to open up a space for Nader, who could bail out a severely damaged Bush presidency by drawing crucial votes from Kerry. But many liberal Democrats think that Nader will have much less success than he did in the last election. "Ralph will try and take advantage of it, but I don't think he's going to have great success because I think everyone understands the threat of Mr. Bush and the architects of preemption," says Robert Borosage, co-director of the Campaign for America's Future, a progressive organizing group. "At the end of the day I think Nader will do much worse than he did four years ago."
Borosage's recommendation for Kerry is much like Zogby's. "I think it would be wise to move towards an Eisenhower-type posture of vowing to end the conflict and get American forces out of there," he says. "Americans understand you can't cut and run, but as the situation gets worse, they're going to be looking for someone who says we have to find a way to bring this occupation to the end and recognize reality, that this occupation is a deteriorating situation, that it can't be sustained without generating destruction."
The plan can come later, Borosage says. "The Eisenhower pledge was only that he would go to Korea. It wasn't that he had a detailed plan or terms of agreement," he says.
In the end, it could turn out that none of the presidential candidates wants to stay in Iraq. Charles Heyman, a senior defense analyst at Janes Consultancy Group based in Britain, believes that both the U.S. and England are quietly trying to engineer a quick pullout.
"I'm not saying there's going to be a withdrawal tomorrow morning," Heyman says. "But the situation is deteriorating steadily. There is some evidence that the U.S. government and the British government are talking behind the scenes to both the U.N. and to some of the insurgent groups, both Sunni and Shiite, and it is likely that they will come up with some sort of political agreement between the lot of them which would allow for a much earlier withdrawal."
"The truth is nobody wants it like this," he says. "If we can talk our way out of it, that's a damn sight better than fighting our way out."
salon.com
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