ANYONE who reads Andrew Sullivan's blog with any regularity is by now familiar with the pit-of-the-stomach loathing he has for so much of Bush's politics.   Sullivan is, after all, a 'devoutly' gay, fiscally conservative, very socially liberal pundit who's had his faith in Bush shaken perhaps far more than mine.

Nevertheless, he is appreciative - as am I - of the core thing that Bush does bring to the table relative to the contenders - a firm, articulated foreign policy.  Sullivan's latest missive is a well written attempt to figure out exactly what Kerry stands for:

[Kerry's] dizzyingly complex record has already set him up for the best line George W. Bush has had in months. In his first campaign speech, Bush said he was surveying the field of Democratic candidates and found them very diverse: "They're for tax cuts and against them. They're for NAFTA and against NAFTA. They're for the Patriot Act and against the Patriot Act. They're in favor of liberating Iraq, and opposed to it. And that's just one senator from Massachusetts."

...People who have been in public life a long time are allowed, of course, to change their minds, to move when new facts emerge or new arguments persuade them. And it is one of George W. Bush's weaknesses that he doesn't seem able to adjust his convictions in the face of empirical evidence that they might need adjusting, changing or fixing. But Kerry goes further than most. And almost all of his adjustments have been in order to serve his immediate political interests rather than to stand up for principle.

And, as I'm fond of pointing out in the blog, the standard isn't perfection, it's the alternative.   Sullivan dutifully notes this maxim when he concludes:

...Kerry is not a panacea. The question this year, I suspect, is not ultimately who is going to win this election. The question to be answered between Kerry and Bush is rather who will be more effective in losing it.