IT'S JOHN KERRY, STUPID

[Epitome22]

IT'S JOHN KERRY, STUPID.
Bad Messenger
by Martin Peretz


I
n its January 19 edition, The New Republic endorsed Joe Lieberman for the Democratic presidential nomination. The decision elicited some ridicule, as it was already clear that Lieberman had no chance of winning. But Lieberman had stood with us on critical issues--the Gulf war, Bosnia, Hollywood's toxic influence on our children, breaking the grip of the teachers' unions on educational policy--and so we stood with him. Nonetheless, Howard Dean, Richard Gephardt, Wesley Clark, and John Edwards had at least one supporter among the magazine's editorial board and each was lauded, more or less, in a signed article by a different editor in the same issue.

Dean was then the front-runner. But, as many people recognized at the time, he was an ideological and temperamental disaster of McGovernite proportions. He would have won Washington, D.C., and maybe Vermont, but lost virtually everywhere else, perhaps including Massachusetts.

Gephardt was a sensible legislator and surprisingly strong on foreign policy. Still, he didn't evoke the kind of enthusiasm that, alas, is required in a modern campaign. Clark was the fashion for a moment (at least in Manhattan and Hollywood) but quickly showed his lack of familiarity with national issues. Edwards failed to meet electoral expectations. Still, his winning personality won him the vice-presidential nomination and made him a lively contrast to the party's stiff and dour presidential designee.

Dennis Kucinich made Dean look moderate. Carol Moseley Braun--who proved calm and even sensible in the debates--partially redeemed a Senate career stained by scandal and a Jesse Jackson-esque affinity for African tyrants. Al Sharpton was the scandal of the campaign. A racist charlatan, he had broadcast Tawana Brawley's libels against conscientious law-enforcement officers and fomented bitter racial conflicts--pitting blacks against Jews in Harlem and Crown Heights, Koreans in Brooklyn, and whites throughout New York. Had he been Caucasian, he would have been treated like David Duke. But John Kerry gave him a prized speaking spot at the party's Boston convention nonetheless and, later on, a grandiloquent title and some flying-around money to serve as the candidate's surrogate. (Not that it did Kerry any good--Sharpton hadn't even won the black vote in the primaries. The African American electorate, thank goodness, no longer has any use for such charlatans.) No editor favored any of these marginal candidates, and none supported Kerry, either. (Some in the Kerry campaign incorrectly blamed me for this. But then, Kerry himself also seems to have thought me decisive in keeping Al Gore from choosing him as vice president in 2000, which was also untrue.)

Still, in the end, the nomination fell to Kerry, who, as I expected all along, duly lost the election to George W. Bush. Kerry (assisted by genius advisers like Bob Shrum and John Sasso) underperformed--in comparison with both Gore and with his own expectations--with virtually every demographic group he had targeted: youth, women, Latinos, African Americans, Catholics, Jews. The big money behind the Democratic campaign--roughly $100 million ploughed into 527 committees by three of the wealthiest men in America--was not enough. The convention had been an exercise in false enthusiasm, and the campaign was an exercise in failed enthusiasm.

I actually believe that, had Lieberman won the nomination, he would have won the election. I think Gore would have as well. Notwithstanding his Iraq position, with which I disagree, Gore is not a foreign policy patsy, as he showed during the Clinton administration. Like Lieberman, people know where he stands--in the solid center.



uesday's Boston Globe brings two pieces of chilling news. Apparently, Howard Dean is contemplating a bid for chairman of the Democratic National Committee. It almost makes you want Terry McAuliffe to stay. The second item was a run-on interview with Kerry's brother, Cameron, who revealed that John just might run for president again and that, in any case, "he's going to ... be a voice for the 55 million people who voted for him." Another aide confided that Kerry "has been working the phones like crazy." But Kerry is not the voice of 55 million people, or even the 55.9 million people who voted for him. It was these people's slightly hysterical antagonism to Bush that brought them (reluctantly) to Kerry rather than anything intrinsic to Kerry himself. In any event, Bush won't be around in 2008, so disdain and hate will no longer produce Democratic votes.

I've known John Kerry for 34 years. We met in the peace movement, and I was present in 1970 when a huge convention of peaceniks rejected him as their candidate in a primary race against Philip Philbin, a Democratic hack and hawk who, through seniority, was then second in command of the House Armed Services Committee. The caucus instead nominated Father Robert Drinan, dean of Boston College Law School, who won the seat and held it for five terms, until Pope John Paul II made him resign.

Even then, no one seemed to like Kerry. (The only person I've known who really does is David Thorne, the brother of his first wife and his classmate at Yale.) Kerry's initial defeats (he also lost a race for Massachusetts' fifth congressional district in 1972) did not deflect him from his ambitions, but he deferred them to attend BC Law School and then work as a prosecutor. He got back into politics in 1982, with his election as Michael Dukakis's lieutenant governor, where his own unpleasantness was somewhat shielded by that of his boss.

He was first elected to the Senate in 1984, the same year as Al Gore. Something demonic in Kerry persuaded him to belittle Gore whenever we met. As their first term started, Kerry boasted to me that he had beaten out Gore for a coveted seat on the Foreign Relations Committee, while Gore had to content himself with Armed Services. But it was the latter committee that went on to do much of the heavy lifting of the next two decades, while J. William Fulbright's old Foreign Relations Committee went into a steep decline. Kerry also became a member of the Intelligence Committee, whose public meetings he attended sparingly and--if one judges from his book The New War--from which he learned little about the terrorist threat that he described so murkily in the last campaign. By contrast, Gore created a real record for himself: on the environment; the Internet; arms control; and nuclear strategy, where he introduced the revolutionary idea of the single-warhead missile.

Today, Democrats are overcome with despair. And I do not doubt that Bush's second term will have its abuses and its nastiness. But they should not delude themselves: John Kerry would not have been a good president; he might even have been a dangerously bad one. Next time, Democrats need to nominate not merely a candidate who they imagine can win but a candidate who deserves to.