Picking up on Ezra here, the "Democrats are clever, wily foreign policy strategists" meme is a great place to start. The important thing is that this idea be imbued with the flavor of dramatic and exciting victory. One of the big differences between the Bush and Kerry foreign policy images of 2004 is that the image of how Bush would lead us to victory in foreign affairs was, for most Americans, easily accessible. We'd fire our guns, drop our bombs, and blow away the bad guys wherever they were in the world. The image of Kerry-style victory was harder to grasp.
Democratic rhetoric on foreign policy has to make this image vivid. I was wishing for Kerry to boast about how a Kerry Administration could've inspected every closet in Iraq for WMD without putting a single soldier into the field. (Give President Kerry a war resolution in November 2002, and that's what happens -- he makes Saddam respect Hans Blix, lets the inspectors keep searching after they made Saddam destroy his Al-Samoud missiles, and we learn that Iraq has no WMD without a single American causalty.)
