Alter, Jonathan. "Memo to Kerry: Connect to Voters" Newsweek May 31 issue

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5040061/

Thucydides thought his fellow Athenians, for all their talk of democracy, were getting awfully arrogant and contemptuous at the end of the Peloponnesian War. It was a time, he wrote, when "reckless audacity" was seen as "courage," and "prudent hesitation" was depicted as "specious cowardice." For the ruling class, "moderation was held to be a cloak of unmanliness" and "the ability to see all sides of a question was accounted inability to act on any."

If this sounds like a hit job on Kerry as a wimpy, feckless flip-flopper (Note to Karl: big ad buy during the Athens Olympics?), it also neatly summarizes the mind-set of the Bush crowd. Kerry's challenge is to defy Thucydides and define a new kind of, well, manly moderation—with Bush as a surprisingly incompetent extremist. Everything else is secondary.