In the Los Angeles Times, columnist Max Boot explains that he hadn’t been terribly committed to Bush’s reelection campaign. He doesn’t agree with the president’s positions on gay marriage and stem-cell research, and he isn’t wild about the huge increase in discretionary spending that has occurred over the past four years. However, Matt Bai’s story in this past weekend’s New York Times Magazine has convinced him that a Kerry presidency would be a Very Bad Thing:

Kerry is offering Clinton redux. This focus on diplomacy and law enforcement, on treating Al Qaeda as if it were the Medellin drug cartel, may have been a plausible posture in the 1990s, when terrorism appeared to be a low-level nuisance. But 9/11 changed everything. Now we know that the jihadists would gladly incinerate one of our cities if they could get their hands on a nuclear bomb — and they won’t be deterred by the prospect of being arrested afterward.