What do you do if you’re John Kerry and no one thinks you can win the 2008 presidential race? Apparently, you try to turn weakness into strength by reframing flip-flopping as open-mindedness — here’s what Kerry wrote in a Washington Post op-ed that ran under the snarky tagline “The case for flip-flopping” (via Power Line):

There’s something much worse than being accused of “flip-flopping”: refusing to flip when it’s obvious that your course of action is a flop.

I say this to President Bush as someone who learned the hard way how embracing the world’s complexity can be twisted into a crude political shorthand. Barbed words can make for great politics. But with U.S. troops in Iraq in the middle of an escalating civil war, this is no time for politics. Refusing to change course for fear of the political fallout is not only dangerous — it is immoral.

I’d rather explain a change of position any day than look a parent in the eye and tell them that their son or daughter had to die so that a broken policy could live.