Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

If the conundrum known as John Kerry is elected to the White House on the grounds that he isn't George W. Bush, he'll take up office in the uncomfortable knowledge that Christopher Hitchens has got his number. If the enigmatic senator from Massachusetts loses in November on the grounds he is John Kerry, the contrarian columnist for Vanity Fair and visiting professor of liberal studies at the New School University, will have played an important part in exposing the absence of presidential substance.

Last Sunday, in the New York Times Book Review section, Hitchens took Kerry's measure by reviewing three books devoted to the Democratic nominee, including one by the candidate himself. "How often have you met a self-described Kerry supporter?" is the penetrating question posed by Hitchens at the outset. While you're pondering that, have a read of this:

"If Kerry is dogged and haunted by the accusation of wanting everything twice over, he has come by the charge honestly. In Vietnam, he was either a member of a 'band of brothers' or of a gang of war criminals, and has testified with great emotion to both convictions. In the Senate, he has either voted for armament and vigilance or he has not, and either regrets his antiwar vote on the Kuwait war, or his initial pro-war stance on the Iraq war, or his negative vote on the financing of the latter, or has not. The Boston Globe writers capture a moment of sheer, abject incoherence, at a Democratic candidates' debate in Baltimore last September: 'If we hadn't voted the way we voted, we would not have been able to have a chance of going to the United Nations and stopping the president, in effect, who already had the votes and who was obviously asking serious questions about whether or not the Congress was going to be there to enforce the effort to create a threat.'

And all smart people know how to laugh at President Bush for having problems with articulation."

Rather devastating, that, eh? Hitchens doesn't shy away from the personal in this review, either. This is barbed: "He has succeeded in getting two very striking and independent women to marry him, the second of whom, though she sometimes resembles a large-print version of Bianca Jagger, is nonetheless living proof that ketchup is not a vegetable." And this is cutting: "I had not known until I read these books that Kerry had had his first marriage annulled, signifying in effect that he was never wed to Julia Thorne, the mother of his children, in the first place. How odd that he would invoke one of the Roman Catholic Church's most pitiless dogmas while treating so many of its other teachings as essentially optional."

Despite the candidate's incoherence and flaws, Hitchens is very fair, I think, when he comes to summing up John Kerry: "We are looking at a man who would make, or would have made, a perfectly decent peacetime president." The thing is, though, peacetime ended on 11 September 2001.