Alex Knapp writes:

To me, the only issue that the Presidential election is going to be decided on is foreign policy and homeland security. And so I’m forced to choose between Bush, who says the right things but whose Administration is so hopelessly incompetent that I can’t guarantee he’ll actually accomplish anything, and Kerry, who is pushing for the wrong policies and policies that are dependent on the actions of other countries to such a degree that I do not believe they will succeed—and this coupled with the fact that I do not believe that Kerry truly understands the nature of the enemy. Not that Bush understands the enemy—but Bush at least knows who they are. I don’t think Kerry does.

I think Alex gets at my discomfiture about Kerry’s performance better than I was able to last night. The Bush problem—why I pronounced his performance abysmal—revolves mostly around the unspoken assumptions that his policy rests on, and which he generally failed to articulate. The Kerry problem is that virtually all of his prescriptions rely on wishful thinking—and much of that wishful thinking has already been refuted.