“Springtime for John Kerry”

Today’s N.Y. Times editorial looks at Senator Kerry’s spring campaign. This point is particularly on target:

More recently, things have gone off course for the Kerry campaign, which is under pressure to accomplish a set of contradictory tasks. It’s not easy to set a positive, optimistic tone while simultaneously trying to convince the nation to fire George W. Bush for being a deceitful politician who doesn’t care about average citizens.
We’d like to see Mr. Kerry veer more toward his own plans than Mr. Bush’s failures. He needs to provide an alternate script to Mr. Bush’s presidency — to explain very specifically what the Bush administration has done that he would do differently. And we’d like him to do it as forthrightly as possible. There was never any doubt that there would be compromises in a presidential campaign, but Mr. Kerry has seemed dishearteningly eager to embrace them. The public needs to see him make the hard choice at least once in a while.

I know TV news coverage doesn’t necessarily represent what the true tenor of the campaign trail, but the vast majority of Kerry sound bytes I see on the news are of shots he is taking at Bush. Feeding red meat to sympathetic audiences worked well during the Democratic primaries, but it’s not going to carry Kerry to victory during the general election. Sure the senator needs to make the case to throw Bush out of office. But he’s got to do more than that. He’s got to sell undecided swing voters on his vision for the future, and why he is the man to lead us there.
Although the election is still seven months away, this is a critical period for Kerry to introduce himself to voters on his terms–positive terms. Yes Americans need to see Bush’s follies in the “war on terror.” But just as importantly they need to hear about Kerry’s agenda for job creation, health care, education, and protecting the environment. Because all things being equal in a political race, the optimistic candidate wins more often than not.