布什会怎样攻击克里？

　　Now that it's clear that John Kerry will be the Democratic nominee for president, the question is how George W. Bush and Karl Rove, his chief political strategist, will attack him. Tom Toles, whose editorial cartoons appear regularly in the centrist WashingtonPost, has a hunch: as an advocate of massive social programs and big federal budgets to pay for them (translation: someone who raises taxes) who is also soft on terrorism.

　　Toles depicts Kerry and an advisor strolling past the White House, atop which workmen are busy covering a billboard with an anti-Kerry ad. The ad says: "Beware the Massalqaeda liborrist." Don't look for the last two words in your dictionary. Toles has concocted them by blending first Massachusetts and al-Qaeda (Usama bin Laden's terrorist organization), second "liberal" and "terrorist". The second blend is reminiscent of the kind of word that President Bush actually does utter when he's not mindful of his speech -- which, it must be said, is a fair amount of the time.

　　A Chinese observer will understand the reference to al-Qaeda and terrorists. Kerry is linked with neither, but he was at best a lukewarm supporter of Bush's invasion of Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein. But what is so politically significant about denouncing Kerry as a "Massachusetts liberal"?

　　Massachusetts, dominated by Boston, with its concentration of elite universities, acquired a reputation in the 20th century as a relatively left-wing US state. Lawmakers there support an extensive and often innovative welfare system -- not on the European scale, but still bigger than in most US states and not cheap. Hence Massachusetts has high taxes; critics deride the state as "Taxachusetts", and occasionally even as the "People's Republic of Massachusetts" because of the warm reception allegedly given to socialist ideas.

　　In America (but not in Europe) "liberals" are people who believe that government regulatory and taxing authority should be used to protect ordinary citizens from the power of big business. They also seek to remedy social inequality through government programs. Having built America's social welfare system, they want to maintain or even extend it. The problem is that many voters see the liberal programs that were put into place in the 1960s and 1970s as wasteful and ineffective, or as examples of wrong-headed social engineering -- the sort of thing Harvard professors and similar overweening boobies would dream up to burden taxpayers with. For these critics, a liberal is bad enough. A "MASSACHUSETTS liberal" is the very worst of a bossy, free-spending, irresponsible tribe.