There’s a lot of blather in their John Kerry profile and the accompanying “editorial”:http://economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?Story_id=2941610 but some interesting things came out as well. They claim that with him as leader:
pre-emption would remain a policy, Ariel Sharon would be backed unflinchingly. Reading between the lines a little, the Kyoto Protocol would remain unjoined; so in all likelihood would the International Criminal Court
I don’t support any of those policies and I didn’t think they were Kerry’s but I suppose I can overlook those in light of his main domestic plank – ‘rescinding a tax cut on people earning more than $200,000 and spending the proceeds on a goodish health-care plan’.
It would be nice to have a president who, as The Economist puts it,
…marshals material exhaustively, immerses himself in details, and forms judgments on a balance of competing evidence…
(they seem to see this as a weakness).
In passing I find it startling that according to an Economist poll they cite 60% of the American public finds Bush “intelligent” and 55% find him “knowledgeable” (Kerry’s numbers in these categories are at least higher on both ratings!)
