Kerry’s Transformation
Jason Zengerle has a very interesting article on the resurrection of John Kerry throughout the 2008 campaign cycle, a sentiment that I think is only bolstered by watching his speech from last night in which he razed the right wing in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan.
One thing I don’t think people always understand about Kerry is that he was talked about as a likely presidential contender as far back as the early 1970s. Consequently, his entire political career in Massachusetts was understood as a precursor to a presidential run. This, in turn, led to a tendency among other Massachusetts Democrats to unfairly assume that each and every case of Kerry doing something they weren’t thrilled with reflected his opportunistic drive for the White House. For the past two years or so has been the first time in decades when it’s been clear that Kerry won’t ever be president, so his action can be — and be seen as — merely the actions of a United States Senator with a safe seat and a passionate concern for certain issues and causes. As with Al Gore’s somewhat similar liberation from Presidential ambitions, I think in part it’s about letting him find his own voice but also in large part about his voice finally being heard as his own rather than read through the lens of devious ambition.
43 Responses to “Kerry’s Transformation”
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August 28th, 2008 at 10:43 am
Hillary’s the same we. She’s mentioned gay Americans at least twice since her concession speech, and never that I know of before. Likewise she’s taken more liberal positions on things like FISA than she ever would have during the 8 years she was running in the 2008 general election.
August 28th, 2008 at 10:46 am
he razed the right wing in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan.
Nice that Matt brings a historical perspective to this.
August 28th, 2008 at 11:05 am
I think Kerry ran an excellent campaign in 2004 and would have won if A) Democrats weren’t continually sniping him (Carville and Coehlo most egregiously… causing him to run flanking maneuvers all the way up to the election) and 2) Bush/Cheney/Rove hadn’t used the entire apparatus of the government (Terror alerts anybody? Haven’t seen but one or two since…) It’s kinda unfair to put anything on Kerry when his allies tried to trip him up and the opposition didn’t succeed on legitimate terms.
It’s also worth noting that, in a call to President Clinton, Kerry refused Clintons advice to embrace the anti-gay marriage amendment cause as a means of triangulating against Bush. From a purely Machiavellian POV, this is advice that would almost certainly have given Kerry the push over the top. That Kerry refused to do so may have cost him the election but saved him his soul. That America still produces men like John Kerry gives me hope.
August 28th, 2008 at 11:13 am
For the past two years or so has been the first time in decades when it’s been clear that Kerry won’t ever be president
I don’t know. Last night was the first time the idea ever popped into my head that if Obama loses, Kerry would make a pretty good primary challenger for Hillary in 2012.
That Kerry refused to do so may have cost him the election but saved him his soul.
You mean the reason he lost the election was that there was an issue on which he did not flip-flop? I think not. An inability to concisely message his complex (and accurate) position on Iraq was what did him in.
August 28th, 2008 at 11:23 am
An inability to concisely message his complex (and accurate) position on Iraq was what did him in.
I think this is at least partly right. I do think some credit/blame lies in the crass politicization of things like terror alerts and such, but sometimes you just don’t get to play on your home field.
And his unwillingness to either a) address the deepest and most malicious personal criticisms head on or b) alternately, to make some personal criticisms of Bush really killed him. He ended up letting the narrative become about character, without going to either offense or defense on it.
(He kinda, sorta, pretended to, with the rhetoric that if they wanted a debate about who served their country better to “bring it on.” But he never actually brought his side.)
He just missed how important it was to the voter, and thought that better sense about more important things (like, say, a war) mattered more.
August 28th, 2008 at 11:23 am
The 2004 election was *so close* that a billion different things plausibly “did Kerry in,” from the Bin Laden tape, to not going negative enough at the convention, to not more aggressively engaging the Swiftboaters, to a very effective GOTV effort by the Republicans… To paraphrase Bob Shrum, if 60K votes had shifted in Ohio, the Kerry campaign would have looked like a work of genius.
August 28th, 2008 at 11:26 am
I don’t disagree that the pressure of being expected to win the presidency is monumental and that removing that pressure will give Kerry (or Gore) the opportunity to relax. But I think it’s worth noting that Obama is the first Dem candidate to really ignore the DNC fascination with micro-managing and packaging the candidate as an “image” rather than a person. Obama’s best feature has always been that he acts and talks and behaves like a real human being, despite his party’s best attempts to turn him into something slick and shiny and utterly inhuman (i.e. Gore 2000, Kerry 2004.)
August 28th, 2008 at 11:34 am
The reason Kerry lost was because the economy was in decent shape and there wasn’t much daylight between him and Bush on Iraq… Bush had the anti-gay marriage ground game advantage… so the incumbent won. I’m actually surprised at how close it was. People give way too much credit to the Swiftboating… the fundamentals just weren’t there for a Dem victory.
However, if Kerry carried himself like this 4 years ago, he very well might have won.
August 28th, 2008 at 11:35 am
The 2004 election was *so close* that a billion different things plausibly “did Kerry in,” from the Bin Laden tape, to not going negative enough at the convention, to not more aggressively engaging the Swiftboaters, to a very effective GOTV effort by the Republicans…
That’s certainly true, but I was talking more from the perspective of things that were under Kerry’s control.
I’m not sure what he could have done against the swiftboating that would have been more effective; no one was prepared for that because no one could have really seen it coming. And I disagree with the “going negative at the convention theory.” I think the 2004 convention was extremely effective, and Kerry won the debates clearly, but he was ultimately undercut by the effective “He was for it before he was against it” line of argument against his Iraq position.
August 28th, 2008 at 11:36 am
I first heard Kerry back in 1990, as the authorization for the first war against Iraq was being debated. He spoke forcefully and eloquently, and I found myself thinking, “I wish that guy would run for president.” Unfortunately, in 2004 I was still hoping that guy would run for president.
I missed last night’s speech, but I’ve caught some of his more recent appearances. He sounded like that guy again. I don’t know if that guy will ever make the White House, but I’m awfully glad that guy is out there. I like that guy. I think that guy can do a lot of good.
August 28th, 2008 at 11:51 am
I think Gore and Kerry also relished the opportunity to tell the DLC-style political consultants to shove it where the sun don’t shine.
August 28th, 2008 at 12:09 pm
I’m a Massachusetts resident, so I get to cast a vote for Kerry again this fall. Just not in the race I want to.
August 28th, 2008 at 12:16 pm
Yeah I guess you can say he’s found his voice now. But it still kind of pisses me off that a guy who could give a barnburner like that and show such emotion for the state of the country in 2008, could barely muster 1/10 of that energy and drive in 2004 when he was in a position to be able to change it. Gore is a different case, I really think he has evolved into a different type of person than he was before 200. But Kerry, this is more a return to form from his weird stilted and dispassionate character from 2004 .
http://thesebastards.blogspot.com/
August 28th, 2008 at 12:42 pm
I’m of the opinion that the swiftboaters changed ZERO minds. Nobody was swayed either way on account of what the swiftboaters said and/or did. The damage was thoroughly internal: with ‘Ragin Cajun’ Carville altogether readier to fight than to win, pestering and badgering endlessly against Mary Beth Cahill (Kerry campaign manager) who (rightly) dismissed the swiftboaters early as cranks against whom no logic or reason could (or indeed did) prevail.
Basically, the swiftboaters just gave the Democrats something with which they could fight about amongst themselves… A weakness that some Dems seem to mistake for talent
August 28th, 2008 at 12:43 pm
I’m no historian, but wasn’t Genghis pretty right-wing himself?
So the argument you’re trying to make is that this is the same Kerry all along, it’s just that our perception of him is different. That’s a tough nugget to take. He lost to the weakest incumbent ever in 2004 because he came across as something he wasn’t, in an effort to win some share of the vote that would otherwise be ideologically opposed to him. It was a flawed strategy compounded by poor execution.
If he had shown one tenth of the stones we saw last night, we’d be talking about his re-election. He didn’t find his voice; he merely gave himself permission to use it, albeit 4 years too late.
August 28th, 2008 at 1:03 pm
Matt’s point is what I thought too. The vice of ambition, inescapable for an actual candidate, is what does people in. When they have no shot at power, they soar.
August 28th, 2008 at 1:06 pm
As noted in the article Matt linked, in 2004 Bush was at 50% in the polls and the economy was relatively sound. Similarly, we’d only been in Iraq for little more than a year. So, I’m not sure your claim of ‘weakest incumbent ever’ is supportable.
That hindsight, sometimes it’s not so 20/20…
August 28th, 2008 at 1:13 pm
I see the situation a little differently. Despite being a hard-core Democrat and very aware of the Rs manipulation of the public images of Dems, with at the very lest the complicity of the MSM, I found myself shocked to see Kerry during the first debate he had with bush, and not just by the contrast with Bush.
Kerry was so clearly a ‘real man’–and I say that with awareness–that I understood for the first time how really effective the Republicans are at selling their images. Though I had been aware of what they were doing, I learned that I was in some way I was buying into their message; ‘Sure, Kerry is a bit of a soft not that masculine guy, but I like guys like that, and besides, it’s the issues that coount.’
And then I saw and heard Kerry and knew how I had been suckered. For the first time, I understood that this was a guy who really could (and did) turn his boat and his body into the line of fire, a guy who had physical courage as well as judgment. (The damn bike pants were meaningless!– except that he should have known better, but maybe none of those older guys know how they look in bike pants, which are only a couple of steps up from speedos.)
i don’t think my metamorphosis was unique, from what I read at the time. Even the conservative leaning local newspaper here in Orlando endorsed Kerry, saying he had the capacity to be a great president.
Last night’s speech reinforced that feeling for me.
The R message is always the same: Dems are “girly” if men, castrating if women. Dem marriages are always ones of political convenience, never loving, never complicated in the way that all marriages are always complicated, but a phony business-political type arrangement.
The Republicans press those images home even in the face of strong coutner-evidence. At the same time, their guy is a real guy, a family man, a man of physical courage and integrity, despite conflicting evidence. if necessary, their guy will be shown to have had a spiritual experience that wipes out evidence that shows him to be an acting out adolescent of dubious intellect.
If other views are expressed, the conservative machine goes into gear to punish the institutions (and the individuals) that stopped selling their product.
I think Kerry always had his voice. The problem was that we didn’t back him up. We never sufficiently back up our guys, either because we lose courage ourselves, or can’t figure out how to. They lose one time and they are dead for the next. We get into high gear blaming them for the loss, and saying, in hindsight, how we know (and knew) how they could have won the election. We take little responsibility ourselves for making it possible for them to appear to be who they are.
Well, speak up. I’d like to know how to defeat the Republican and MSM alliance. The Repugs are thugs and liars; excepting the few, the MSM are cowards and/or careerists, owned by their corporate bosses.
It won’t be easy, but we could at least find our own courage and give our politicians the courage to find their own
When Wesley Clark told the truth about the significance of McCain’s POW experience, he got from little support, either from Obama or Obama’s allies. Everyone ran for cover, not wanting to be seen as talking bad about a POW, lest they victimized like Clark.
And would the damn Dems give up on that ‘McCain’s a good man and my friend’ crap? Enough already! McCAin’s an abusive, tempermental, hotdogging, ill-informed crank, and mediocre in every respect except his ambition and his personal wealth and family connections. (And his mother. I like his mother.)
.
August 28th, 2008 at 1:15 pm
Matt could just as well be talking about Teddy Kennedy instead of Kerry. He didn’t really become a towering figure in the Senate until after his presidential ambitions ended for good in 1980.
August 28th, 2008 at 1:21 pm
That is a great line, Matt. LoL.
Look, no incumbent wartime president has ever, in the history of the Republic, lost a re-election campaign. John Kerry came closer to clearing that hurdle than any other challenger had ever done. Therefore, talking about his “failure” is like talking about how lousy the NY Giants played in game 16 of the 2007 regular season. Yup, they lost, but if you conclude from that datum that they played a bad game, you were probably pretty stunned by the outcome of the Superbowl.
August 28th, 2008 at 1:42 pm
No.
August 28th, 2008 at 1:58 pm
Look, no incumbent wartime president has ever, in the history of the Republic, lost a re-election campaign.
Well, technically that’s perhaps true, but I think Lyndon Johnson would object.
August 28th, 2008 at 3:01 pm
If losing primaries or presidential elections is a way of getting better Senators, and rebuilding the Senate as a co-equal branch of government, then that’s a good thing.
The idea that you have to have the top job in order to do good stuff in American politics was never part of the original deal, and never part of the structures that still exist.
August 28th, 2008 at 3:01 pm
I’d assumed Matt was just name-checking[?] the younger John Kerry’s description of the depredations of some of our troops in Vietnam as being reminiscent of those in the days of Genghis Khan, which he pronounced nearly properly (see the Mongol “Чингис Хаан”) as “Jinghiz”. I recall some Republican’s saying that he hated Kerry from the moment he heard him pronounce it that way; presumably “ghenn-giss” was good enough for his gran’th’er, and anyone who said otherwise was a faggot smarty-pants.
August 28th, 2008 at 3:13 pm
Kerry’s speech reminded me of the enthusiasm I had for him in 2004. While it is fashionable to deride him now, he did win the second largest number of Presidential votes in history. Defeating an incumbent President before the full scope of the disaster he represented was fully appreciated was an uphill climb.
August 28th, 2008 at 4:14 pm
Kerry’s really gotten a bum rap. Above all, he fell victim to the ever-more rapidly declining culture of soundbites that constitutes the news media. If the media only covers the meaningless aspects of your campaign, while parroting right wing talking points, then the election is rigged.
Furthermore, as an Ohioan, illegal vote suppression handed Bush the election.
Holding 2004 against Kerry is like holding 1972 against McGovern (which of course we DO) even though the phones were all tapped and the party was subverted by blackmail. The loser of a fixed election can’t be held accountable.
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