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I know I hate when people I appreciate technically go off on massive political diatribes on their blogs. So, fair warning, this is one of those. I’ll keep it contained to this post for a while.

I noticed that Kerry finally explained himself on his vote for funding the Iraq war, several months after Bush started beating him over the head with it. Good for him, and about damn time. It shouldn’t have been about Kerry voting no; it should be about Bush throwing candy at his corporate donors under the guise of “funding the troops.”

But what is at issue should not be whatever Kerry did as a senator. That’s an easy mark for any incumbent president. Congress is a deliberative body, where people discuss and compromise — and protest — all the time. That and the fact that senators running for president tend to miss votes because they dare to campaign forms the template for every campaign against them. And we’re seeing that clearly in the Republican talking points this time around: Kerry’s a flip-flopper who is missing important votes in the Senate.

But let’s step back for a moment. That $87 billion appropriations bill Kerry voted for, then against, had added unrelated riders, sponsored by the president, that made voting for it unpalatable. And this is how the game is played: someone introduces the Cute Fuzzy Puppies Bill. Someone else attaches a rider to, say, give automatic weapons to every child in New York City. Now, you as a Senator like cute fuzzy puppies. But the rider forces you to vote no, because on the whole, it’s a bad law. As a result, when you run for re-election, you’ll be the most outspoken opponent of cute fuzzy puppies since Cruella DeVille.

Naturally, this little game plays well in the sticks, and politicians love it because it distracts from legitimate discourse on the issues. This requires Kerry to have laser focus on a key Bush weakness in order to win.

The questions Kerry’s team should be planting in people’s heads at this point are these: Do you think Kerry would have had someone in his Cabinet who, on the evening of September 11th, having good information already that al Qaida was responsible, would have been rationalizing the invasion of Iraq? Would he have been listening to someone like Douglas Feith, an Iraq war advocate who in the week after 9/11 also proposed the tortured logic of an invasion in South America or Asia in response? Would he take much of this advice at face value and without reservation, arriving at the situation we’re in today? Kerry needs to make people ask those questions, and he needs them to answer no.

There will be some who say that it’s dangerous to pin an election’s hopes on a hypothetical such as this. But it’s also dangerous to allow the sitting president to be lionized simply because he was in the Oval Office on September 11th, 2001. His astronomical ratings then had little to do with his performance in the first few hours of the attack. They were merely a patriotic proxy vote: here you go, pal. Go take care of business. To a great extent, that has disappeared, but the places where it hasn’t, the places where liberals and moderates became flag-waving hawks, are where the battle is focused. There needs to be a way to remind those people that 9/11 would make any sitting president a uniter, a hawk, a hero. The pre-9/11 Bush would have lost badly in 2004 because of his poor leadership, his poor work ethic, his poor decisions, and his entourage of wrong-thinking policymakers. Democrats need to remind voters of this Bush, because even through the fog of war, he’s still that same guy.

I’m TiVoing the debate, to be watched in a week, when I’m back from Zürich (via Toronto). I hope to hell Kerry doesn’t allow himself to get zinged to death. And that he doesn’t sigh too loudly into the mic.