YOU might think the Abu Ghraib prison scandal would be helpful for John Kerry’s presidential hopes. But the early indications – from the Gallup polling organization – suggest yet again that President Bush’s problems are not doing much to boost Kerry’s standing.
Indeed, it’s possible that the images of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib might push more than a few hundred thousand potential Kerry voters in a direction that would be disastrous for the Democratic nominee – toward Ralph Nader.
I’m not talking here about mainstream Democrats or holders of conventional liberal opinion. I’m talking about genuine, unapologetic leftists – the sort that see the United States as the key source of the world’s woes and view capitalism as a dangerous and noxious force.
The Abu Ghraib photos offer these American leftists the perfect psychological opportunity they need to fly off the political rails. They’ve been hungering for it ever since the run-up to the war in Iraq.
To the extent that these people vote Democratic, they do so grudgingly and with some measure of unhappiness, because they do not think that the Democratic Party is a true party of the Left. They think both parties are in the pocket of corporate interests.
Who are these people? They are the folks who demonstrated across the country before the Iraq war. They show up to riot whenever the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund hold meetings. Their idea of an American Idol is Michael Moore.
They make up a tiny share of the American population, maybe 1 or 2 percent, but they potentially make up 6 or 7 percent of the electorate. Three million of them voted for Ralph Nader in 2000, and others probably stayed home.
Democrats have been presuming that such people will vote for their party’s candidate because they hate George W. Bush with such a passion that ousting him from the presidency will cause them to make common cause with the Democrats.
I think this analysis is wrong. Yes, they hate Bush with a consuming passion. But the truth is that they hate the United States of America more. They find the war in Iraq loathsome not because they are pacifists, but because the idea that America is a liberator nation sickens and enrages them.
And that’s why Abu Ghraib might be John Kerry’s worst nightmare: The anti-American Left is already seizing on these photos and the behavior of .001 percent of the Americans present in Iraq as evidence that the entire U.S. effort in Iraq is a moral catastrophe from stem to stern.
The issue will no longer be the supposed “lies” of George W. Bush, but the supposedly “criminal” conduct of the American occupiers. In other words, they will openly turn from blaming Bush to blaming American troops, American soldiers, American contractors – and America herself.
Such people will not be mollified by the stance of the Kerry campaign, which is that the stated goal of the United States in Iraq will remain in force in a Kerry administration. Kerry also says he wants to stay until the job is done – to achieve a stable, functioning representative government. He wants to use other means and other strategies, but he still wants the same outcome.
The anti-war Left wants Americans out of Iraq. Not because it fears for their safety, but because it hungers to see an American defeat – no, more than a defeat, a humiliation.
Ralph Nader is the one candidate in the race who is calling for total American withdrawal from Iraq – and he does so on the grounds that what we are doing there is wrong and bad.
Abu Ghraib ensures that the anti-American passions will remain stoked throughout the year. Every vote Nader gets in November is a vote Kerry needs. This has been a good week for Nader, and that makes it a bad week for Kerry.