SEATTLE – The harsh words Democratic presidential hopeful John Kerry had for the Bush administration’s handling of the Iraq war sounded just fine to David Davies of Stanwood.
The Army veteran and Kerry supporter drove to the opera house Thursday without much hope that Kerry’s speech would inspire him, figuring it wouldn’t stray far from what he’s already heard.
Yet, he said he walked away with a sense of hope he hasn’t felt in years.
“We can’t go on being the bully on the block, because all it’s doing is alienating people,” said Davies, an engineering technician who served one tour in Vietnam as a radio and telegraph operator.
Davies, 55, was one of scores of veterans in a crowd of several hundred Kerry supporters who attended the invitation-only speech, in which the Massachusetts senator outlined his foreign policy plans.
“Failure (in Iraq) would be a boon to our enemies and jeopardize the long-term prospects for a peaceful, democratic Middle East – leaving us at war not just with a small, radical minority, but with increasingly large portions of the entire Muslim world,” Kerry said.
Kenneth Watts, 61, of Seattle, who spent two decades in the Army Reserves and fought in the Gulf War, said he supports Kerry’s call for broadening international support for troops in Iraq.
“I just feel we’re fighting a dead end at this time with the war in Iraq, and I think he has a policy to end this war,” said Watts, a retired Boeing engineer.
President Bush’s campaign was quick to denounce Kerry’s speech as long on rhetoric and short on concrete plans.
“It appears Sen. Kerry is more interested in attacking the president than winning the war on terror or offering an agenda for the American people,” campaign spokesman Dan Ronayne said by telephone.
Ronayne questioned Kerry’s claim that the Bush administration thumbed its nose at the world and invaded Iraq with a “coalition of the few.”
“He’s called our coalition partners window dressing. We have 42 countries helping us shoulder the burden in Iraq,” Ronayne said.
Kerry’s advisers promoted the speech as a major policy address kicking off an 11-day focus on national security and foreign policy. In addition to forging new alliances with foreign countries, Kerry said he would modernize the military to meet terrorist threats, use diplomacy, intelligence and economic power to help keep the country safe, and would free the country from dependence on oil from the Middle East.
Jen Rogers, 33, a University of Washington graduate student in public policy, said she liked Kerry’s idea of weaning the United States from its reliance on Middle East oil, in part through tax credits encouraging auto manufacturers to build more fuel-efficient cars. Overall, though, she said she wished she’d heard more specifics.
Ron Crerar, 51, of Camano Island, who worked stateside as an Air Force air traffic controller during the Vietnam war, said Kerry’s campaign has offered people “more specifics than they could possibly use.”
“A one-sentence answer to complex questions doesn’t work all the time,” he said.
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