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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
He's been unfairly maligned even by Democrats. But the man who almost beat Bush was a heroic candidate who weathered a brutal campaign on behalf of the American people.
Nov 5, 2004 | Early on in the presidential campaign, my lefty friends told me they would probably vote for John Kerry, but with regret and gritted teeth. "My choices are 'Skull and Bones' George Bush or 'Skull and Bones' John Kerry," a friend sneered at me. John Kerry was "no Bill Clinton," other friends have sighed; Bubba was flawed, but he wasn't a drone, a bore and a stiff, like this guy. "ABB," or Anybody but Bush, was one of the campaign's persistent clichés. If John Kerry won this election, the sentiment was, he wouldn't have won, exactly -- because no one is really for John Kerry -- George Bush would have lost.
But now that the campaign is over, John Kerry deserves better than that. He proved himself to be a man of principle and a fierce competitor. He came within 136,438 votes in Ohio -- maybe fewer once those provisional ballots are counted -- of unseating a wartime president and spoiling the dreams of a Republican Party bent on three-branch domination. He certainly wasn't a perfect candidate, and he surely did not run a perfect campaign. But who was the perfect Democratic candidate in 2004? Howard Dean? Let's not revisit the scream, shall we? I shudder to think of what Karl Rove, with his millions and his minions, would have done to the good doctor from Vermont. Dean's crystal-clear antiwar position may have won over some voters, and you surely can't label him a "flip-flopper." But as principled as he was, and despite his success motivating the left early on, if he couldn't survive the primary season, he surely couldn't have weathered a fight with the Republicans.
Would John Edwards have been a better nominee? If you think the left wasn't excited about John Kerry, let me introduce you to a multimillionaire trial lawyer from North Carolina with limited liberal credentials who could never quite shed that sheen of insincerity and would have been clobbered for his lack of national security experience. No, John Kerry was the best the Democratic Party had to offer this year, and that was actually saying a lot.
And think of what he was up against. No incumbent president has ever lost in wartime. It's tough enough to unseat an incumbent in peacetime, especially one with gobs of money and the conservative grass roots mobilized behind it. True, Bush's failure to catch Osama bin Laden and generally tame the al-Qaida threat, and his reckless diversion into Iraq, should have cost him the election; and the Democrats never successfully hung that on the president. But with Dick Cheney warning of impending nuclear holocaust, and the Bush campaign's general theme of "Vote Democrat and die," the Republicans scared enough voters into sticking with their approach. The economy hasn't been friendly to average Americans, but it wasn't bad enough to eclipse the war in Iraq and terrorism in voters' minds. And Bush's push for tax cuts, as skewed toward the wealthy elite as his policy is, clearly resonated with many voters.
John Kerry was also up against Rove, whose strategy of focusing on "moral issues" like abortion and gay marriage and playing to Bush's evangelical base turned out to be prescient. Bill Clinton advised Kerry to neutralize the gay issue by backing the same-sex marriage bans that passed in 11 states on Tuesday. Kerry declined. He has stated public opposition to gay marriage and support for civil unions, but voted against the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, calling it "legislative gay-bashing."
