A New York Times article on Kerry has lots of interesting stuff.

Here's one:

When I asked Kerry's campaign advisers about these poll numbers, what I heard from some of them in response was that Kerry's theories on global affairs were just too complex for the electorate and would have been ignored -- or, worse yet, mangled -- by the press. ''Yes, he should have laid out this issue and many others in greater detail and with more intellectual creativity, there's no question,'' one adviser told me. ''But it would have had no effect.''

This is, of course, a common Democratic refrain: Republicans sound more coherent because they see the world in such a rudimentary way, while Democrats, 10 steps ahead of the rest of the country, wrestle with profound policy issues that don't lend themselves to slogans. By this reasoning, any proposal that can be explained concisely to voters is, by definition, ineffective and lacking in gravitas

Nice to know that we are too stupid to understand Kerry's secret plan and any plan that can be explained is too simplistic to work. And they wonder why the Republicans control all three branches of government.

This is the part that people are paying attention to:

When I asked Kerry what it would take for Americans to feel safe again, he displayed a much less apocalyptic worldview. ''We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a nuisance,'' Kerry said. ''As a former law-enforcement person, I know we're never going to end prostitution. We're never going to end illegal gambling. But we're going to reduce it, organized crime, to a level where it isn't on the rise. It isn't threatening people's lives every day, and fundamentally, it's something that you continue to fight, but it's not threatening the fabric of your life.''

To put this in context, this is not that different from Bush's statement, ''I don't think you can win it,'' which Democrats pounced on. At the time Kerry said that he could win the war on terror. Now he, too, admits that he cannot.

We shouldn't jump on him for making this admission, but then, he shouldn't have jumped on Bush for saying it.

But we can argue with his tactics and his analogies. At what point does terrorism become a nuisance? I've written before about the far-left insistence that we should be ignoring terrorism. They think that, since terrorists normally kill fewer people than lightening, that we should ignore terrorism and regard 9/11 as an anomaly.

Look at Kerry's examples. Prostitution and gambling are legal in some places. He didn't mention drugs but that is where organized crime gets most of its money and some of Kerry's supporters have funded drug legalization.

No one is trying to legalize terrorism.

Similar thoughts here.

But what remarkable analogies Kerry started with: prostitution and illegal gambling. The way law enforcement has dealt with prostitution and illegal gambling is by occasionally trying to shut down the most visible and obvious instances, tolerating what is likely millions of violations of the law per year, de jure legalizing many sorts of gambling, and de jure legalizing one sort of prostitution in Nevada, and de facto legalizing many sorts of prostitution almost everywhere; as best I can tell, "escort services" are very rarely prosecuted, to the point that they are listed in the Yellow Pages.

These are examples of practical surrender, or at least a cease-fire punctuated by occasional but largely half-hearted and ineffectual sorties. It's true that illegal gambling and prostitution aren't "threatening the fabric of [American] life," but that's because they never threatened it that much in the first place. One can live in a nation with millions of acts of prostitution or illegal gambling per year or per day. There are good reasons for simply calling off those wars altogether. Surely the strategy for dealing with terrorism must be very different, in nearly every conceivable way, from the strategy for dealing with prostitution or illegal gambling.

At it's heart, though, Kerry is trying to find a way of turning the clock back to 9/10/2001. If we just share information with foreign countries and monitor banks more closely (but not as closely as the Patriot Act would have it) then we can go back to ignoring terrorism.

The rallying cry of the far Left since 9/12/2001 has been that we should be able to figure out why the terrorists hate us, make a few changes in foreign policy, and everything would be fine.

Kerry offers a different route but the same destination. The French, being so much more cosmopolitan, know everything that the terrorists are doing but will not warn us as long as Bush is in office. Also, Kerry will invade state sponsors of terrorism with small bands of special forces instead of hundreds of thousands of troops.

Kerry's view, that the 21st century will be defined by the organized world's struggle against agents of chaos and lawlessness, might be the beginning of a compelling vision. The idea that America and its allies, sharing resources and using the latest technologies, could track the movements of terrorists, seize their bank accounts and carry out targeted military strikes to eliminate them, seems more optimistic and more practical than the notion that the conventional armies of the United States will inevitably have to punish or even invade every Islamic country that might abet radicalism.

Intelligence sharing was the Clinton-era answer to terrorism. Even Clinton rejected targeted military strikes because of the impossibility of small forces fighting their way in and back out of a hostile nation. Not to mention what it would do to foreign relations if we started sending troops into other countries without warning (if we warn them then the missions would fail).

Kerry also subscribes to the notion that terrorism will wither without its leaders. If we can capture Osama bin Laden then everything will be fine.

Except the Left also says that the breakup of al Qeda's central command structure made them more dangerous.

A different Kerry belief that he has stated many times:

Kerry, too, envisions a freer and more democratic Middle East. But he flatly rejects the premise of viral democracy, particularly when the virus is introduced at gunpoint. ''In this administration, the approach is that democracy is the automatic, easily embraced alternative to every ill in the region,'' he told me. Kerry disagreed. ''You can't impose it on people,'' he said. ''You have to bring them to it. You have to invite them to it. You have to nurture the process.''

I wonder how the Senator explains Afghanistan. Millions voted. Taliban violence was minimal. Even protests about voters being able to vote multiple times have lifted. Gunpoint democracy seems to be working there.