WARRIORS.(The Talk of the Town)(George W. Bush and John Kerry)

In Seattle last Tuesday night, John Kerry gave a perfectly O.K. victory speech. He was a little wooden, though marginally less so than he'd been in Manchester the week before or in Des Moines the week before that. He still has a tendency to orate at people ("We will resume the great march of our history"), though as he gets closer to the presidency his stiff, solemn formality gets easier to take. Yes, the speech was perfectly O.K. And what was most O.K. about it, from the point of view of many Democratic voters, was that it was a victory speech. With great passion, Democrats want to win--want to win more than they want to dominate or punish each other. The result, so far, may be the least bitter struggle for an open Presidential nomination in living memory. The traditional circular firing squad looks weirdly like a phalanx.

There are plenty of reasons for Senator Kerry's emergence, but the most important can be plainly seen in those primary-night tableaux. Behind Kerry and around him, salted among the local politicians and the family members and the union bigwigs, are always the veterans--grizzled, weatherbeaten, and exempt from the dress code. They have been the spark and soul of Kerry's campaign. He acknowledges them first, and in the first-person plural: "We're a little older and a little grayer, but we still know how to fight for our country."

A couple of months ago, when Kerry's once front-running campaign seemed all but dead, the common view among the political cognoscenti was that his Vietnam experience was not doing for him what it was supposed to do. He sounded boastful; he sounded defensive; he sounded like he was living in the past. Journalists were bored with it--they thought it might even hurt him, because his contemporaries, most of whom never served, might take it as a kind of reproach, while younger people might see it as a case of overbearing boomer chauvinism, like insisting that the car radio be tuned to Classic Rock. But, now that the actual voting is well under way, Democrats young and old are flocking to Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Kerry.

Howard Dean and his supporters thought that the "war issue" was about Iraq and that it would help them; after all, the position that the remaining viable candidates eventually adopted--that the rush to war was a mistake (and that Iraq, having been conquered, must now be salvaged)--was Dean's from the start. But Iraq may have helped Kerry at least as much as it helped Dean. As Tom Schaller, a University of Maryland political scientist, has pointed out, many Democratic voters themselves went through something close to Kerry's own fitful evolution, which took him from agonized support of authorizing force (at a time when the Administration was maintaining that force would be a last resort) to angry denunciation of the war's deceitful prologue and chaotic aftermath.

In any event, the "war issue" transcends Iraq. In some mysterious way, it has become what professionals call a character issue. Originally, for Kerry supporters and strategic voters eager above all to unseat President Bush, the calculus was fairly straightforward. Alone among the candidates, Kerry was a war hero. Therefore, once the Bush-Cheney campaign, with its nearly two hundred million dollars and its talk-radio outliers, revved up the rotating knives, only Kerry would have a shield against attempts to portray the Democrats as unpatriotic wimps.

This logic was so powerful that it drew Wesley Clark into ...