Mr. Anything

[FishForLunch]

The Pandescenderer
John Kerry, Mr Anything

Here's a word that deserves to be entered into the political lexicon. The blogger Mickey Kaus coined it. It's "pandescender." It stems from John Kerry's remarkable political ability to both pander and condescend to voters at the same time. In a word, it's what's obviously wrong with the Kerry candidacy for president of the United States, and, even in the early post-primary glow of his anointing, is troubling even die-hard Democrats as they confront president Bush in the fall.

Start with the pandering. Over the many years that John Kerry has been in the United States senate, the Democrat from Massachusetts has accumulated an astonishing ability to have been on every side of most issues. There's a polite way of saying this, of course. The Washington Post recently reported that "Kerry's past support for policies he now condemns is complicating his run for the White House, strategists from both parties say, and could prove problematic." Or here's how the editors of the New York Times expressed it: "What his critics see as an inability to take strong, clear positions seems to us to reflect his appreciation that life is not simple."

Well, life isn't simple. But it doesn't have to be as subtly, preternaturally, systematically complex as John Kerry makes it out to be. His dizzyingly complex record has already set him up for the best line George W. Bush has had in months. In his first campaign speech, Bush said he was surveying the field of Democratic candidates and found them very diverse: "They're for tax cuts and against them. They're for NAFTA and against NAFTA. They're for the Patriot Act and against the Patriot Act. They're in favor of liberating Iraq, and opposed to it. And that's just one senator from Massachusetts."

Bush's line is effective because he has a point. Take a couple of obvious issues in American politics. Affirmative action. As writer Michael Grunwald recently pointed out, in 1992, John Kerry made something of a splash attacking racial preferences as counter-productive and divisive. Kerry worried out loud about whether such racial set-asides encouraged a "culture of dependency." It seemed like a brave statement of the time - from a man willing to challenge Democratic orthodoxy. But almost as soon as he had uttered those words, Kerry backtracked. His current position is blanket support for all affirmative action. His campaign website brags that he has "consistently opposed efforts in the Senate to undermine or eliminate affirmative action programs, and supports programs that seeks to enhance diversity."

On another critical issue, education reform, Kerry once took on the all-powerful teacher's unions whose resistance to weeding out poor teachers and allowing parents greater choice in schools has been a huge drag on improving performance and raising standards. In 1998, he supported giving head teachers more leeway to fire bad teachers, end tenure and allow for real reform. Now, he's once again a tool of the teachers' lobby. His campaign brochure promises to "stop blaming and start supporting public school educators," and to give them "better training and better pay, with more career opportunities, more empowerment and more mentors."

You can point to a long litany of other issues where Kerry has taken one position and then regressed to another. Even in this campaign, he started out as pro-war (he voted for it in the Senate) and then, sensing Howard Dean's appeal, swung against it. In the Senate, he voted for the Iraq war resolution and then against the $87 billion needed to fund the reconstruction. On trade, Kerry's record has been consistently - yes consistently! - in favor of free trade. But as soon as John Edwards' charismatic protectionism seemed to threaten his momentum, Kerry shifted back to talking about "putting teeth" into labor and environment protections in free trade agreements.

People who have been in public life a long time are allowed, of course, to change their minds, to move when new facts emerge or new arguments persuade them. And it is one of George W. Bush's weaknesses that he doesn't seem able to adjust his convictions in the face of empirical evidence that they might need adjusting, changing or fixing. But Kerry goes further than most. And almost all of his adjustments have been in order to serve his immediate political interests rather than to stand up for principle.

All of this is troubling enough - and it's the reason behind George Bush's first round of political ads which were unveiled last week. Their theme is that Bush is steady, firm, principled and reliable. The implication, although Kerry is not mentioned in the ads at all, is that Kerry is none of the above. But Kerry also has a charm problem. He's not, mercifully, Al Gore. He will, I think, be no less formidable a candidate (and it's important to remember that Al Gore won a majority of the popular vote). But he does look and sound aristocratic, even European. He doesn't have the populist Democratic touch of a Howard Dean or a John Edwards or a Bill Clinton. Without his Vietnam veteran appeal, he wouldn't even be close to viability as a candidate. In Massachusetts, it's hard to find anyone who actually likes him - especially among those hacks who have covered him over the years or among the grittier Boston pols who have had to deal with him.

One local hack, Howie Carr, a priceless muck-raking columnist in the down-market Boston Herald, has made a career out of lampooning Kerry's aloofness. On his radio call-in show Carr would field caller after caller relaying various anecdotes (which I cannot independently verify) of how Kerry or his entourage had once pushed to the front of a queue somewhere or wangled himself out of a parking ticket, or ejected someone from a restaurant table, and on and on. Petty, petty stuff. But it accumulates. The noblesse oblige reputation even developed an acronym: DYKWIA syndrome. That's short for "Do You Know Who I Am?" It's not exactly a good slogan for a politician. Especially someone up against a likable chap like Dubya.

Or consider this extract from a recent campaign piece in the Boston Globe, noticed by Kaus, which epitomizes the problem: "Later, Kerry led a question-and-answer forum with workers at a Youngstown manufacturing plant, where the senator drew polite applause at points but also some lengthy silences. He answered seven questions over 27 minutes; three of his answers lasted more than five minutes apiece." Ouch.

Don't get me wrong. I do not believe that Kerry is a doomed candidate. He has fought some very tough campaigns over the years and done so successfully. He has been under-rated before, not least in this campaign. The president has had an awful few months and is in danger of losing critical independent votes, over his muddled defense of the war, his fiscal irresponsibility and his catering to the religious right. And the Democrats have had a relatively cost-free primary season, are energized to beat Bush, and are already neck and neck, if not ahead, in the polls.

But Kerry is not a panacea. The question this year, I suspect, is not ultimately who is going to win this election. The question to be answered between Kerry and Bush is rather who will be more effective in losing it.