Andrew Sullivan finally comes out and says what he’s been dying to say for quite some time—John F. Kerry is the right choice for conservatives.

Much of the hard work has now been done. Nobody seriously believes that Bush will start another war. And in some ways Kerry may be better suited to the difficult task of nation building than Bush.

At home Bush has done much to destroy the coherence of a conservative philosophy of American government and he has been almost criminally reckless in his conduct of the war. He and America will never live down the intelligence debacle of the missing WMDs. He and America will be hard put to regain the moral high ground after Abu Ghraib.

The argument that Kerry must make is that he can continue the war but without Bush’s polarising recklessness. And at home he must reassure Americans that he is the centrist candidate, controlled neither by the foaming Michael Moore left nor by the vitriolic religious right.

Put all that together and I may not find myself the only conservative moving slowly and reluctantly towards the notion that Kerry may be the right man — and the conservative choice — for a difficult and perilous time.

It’s a disappointment to see Sullivan get all sloppy drunk on the Abu Ghraib torture-flavored Koolaid, not to mention the almost stereotypical leftist accusation of an American intelligence debacle—when the intelligence services of every major Western power came to the same conclusions about Saddam’s weapons.

Sullivan has completed his reversion to a September 10 mindset. He thinks the hard work is done, that the worst is over.

But the jihad continues. It’s sad that one of the first to identify and write coherently about the ideology of Islamofascism has become so complacent.