If Senator Kerry can’t stand up to the police union in Boston, how is he going to stand up to Al Qaeda? That is the jibe that’s being heard in Beantown, and that’s just from the Democrats. It seems that the presumptive Democratic nominee for president declined, after much indecision, to cross a picket line thrown up by the city’s police and firefighters unions.

President Reagan facing down the air traffic controllers did not go unnoticed in Kremlin camarilla that was then taking the measure of the American president. Neither we, nor anyone else, would want to compare any patriotic, free American labor union to an American enemy. The AFL-CIO of Irving Brown, Albert Shanker, and Lane Kirkland was genuinely heroic in winning the Cold War, and some elements within labor have supported the war on terrorism.

The point here is not about labor but about management. The presidency Mr. Kerry seeks is management. It involves managing the federal workforce in a way that sometimes requires not giving the public employee unions everything that they want. It also requires taking on other powerful constituencies in ways that sometimes makes them unhappy. It always needs resolve in standing up to adversaries. Which is why people were watching in Boston and beyond.