1. Campaigns are poison for serious proposals. If the past few years have shown anything, it's that serious policy consideration just doesn't happen during campaigns. Even if there were a good idea, would it poll well? Would the average swing voter have the basis for making a judgement about a serious proposal? There's a reason the republicans have made cutting taxes their perennial favorite proposal: it's so dead simple an idea that even the most brain-dead voter gets what it's supposed to mean. Breaking through with anything more complex than "Stay the course" or "withdraw" is going to be dicey.

2. Bush has worked his usual magic, and so there aren't any good alternatives. All three of Kevin's policy either have obvious downsides (partition will bring civil war, the other two take too long to have any effect on our current crisis). Count on the Bushies, along with their servants in the corporate media, to hammer at these downsides while playing up some mythical alternative (let the "bad guys" know who's boss by "staying the course" and showing perseverance blah blah blah). Any serious proposal will be making the least disastrous choice among bad alternatives. Hardly the thing to rally a campaign around.

3. It's probably not necessary. If the triumph of the Gropenator shows us anything, it's that you don't need a serious policy proposal in place to win a campaign. Kerry can make noises about working with our allies and putting the Iraqis back in charge and stop wasting money on corruption and it'll resonate just as strongly as a genuine thought-through policy.

4. In any case anything specific proposed now will be rendered moot by January. Best to keep it vague and deal with the disaster then rather than now. Whatever needs to be done will be pretty unpopular; let's win the election first and worry afterwards about spending political capital on pachyderm janitorial services.

I wonder if what Kerry needs to concentrate on isn't convincing people that he's got some magic wand he can wave in the air and solve the problem of Iraq -- the equivalent of Nixon's "Secret Plan" to end the war in Vietnam -- but convincing them that under a Kerry administration, there will be no more Iraqs, and without damaging our security at home.

People can see, or will at some point be able to be convinced, that the problem Bush has created with his half-assed plan for and incompetent execution of the occupation and stabilization of Iraq may be so deep that it has no real solution, and if they reach that point, they won't hold Kerry responsible for it in the same way they will Bush. Even if Kerry is only offering them an outline of a plan of action not dissimilar from Bush's (because the range of options open to us has been so severely constricted by the position Bush has put us in), they have an interest in going to Kerry if he can convince them they under his stewardship, there won't be any other egregious mistakes made similar to the Iraq invasion.

Bush, of course, can't offer that option, because he can't -- and won't -- admit that Iraq was a mistake, and because he is still committed to the policies which got us into the quicksand in the first place.