Matt Continetti highlights what should be John Kerry's biggest problem in wooing conservatives and September 12 people.

I've always thought that Kerry's flip-flopping wasn't his chief liability. As they say at Reuters, one man's "flip-flop" is another man's "considered abandonment of ideology in the face of contrary political necessity."

In fact, the heart of Kerry's appeal to woo-able conservatives (like me) is that he doesn't really mean all that stuff about multilateralism and sensitive wars; that, if confronted with another September 11, public pressure would force him to abandon his Eurocentrist pose. Then, working with Republican hard-liners in Congress, he would become an anti-terror, super-hawk bad-ass--because it would be politically expedient. All hail the flip-flop!

But Continetti's piece suggests that Kerry may actually have some real convictions: He might really believe that there is no such thing as American exceptionalism and that we bring trouble on ourselves by being imperialist pigs.