In Defense of Candidate KerryCaptain Ed
has noticed that Kerry is giving out strong signals that he will be running in 2008. Ed's a little scornful:
The truth is that Kerry is a dreadful candidate -- no record to speak of, a pretentious speaker, with clumsy political skills that would have killed his career anywhere else but in Massachusetts.It's fairly safe to say that the Left feels the same way. Of course, they'd cut to the heart of the matter in their minds: Kerry was running against Chimpy Shrub McHitler and he lost, therefore he's a terrible candidate.
It seems to me that if those of us on the Right want to accept the Left's conclusion, we are going to have a very tough time avoiding their premise. Consider: If we agree that Kerry was a terrible candidate, then what would have happened if Kerry had been a better candidate? Suppose he hadn't ordered up that ridiculous hagiography
Tour of Duty. Suppose he'd made a clean break with his Vietnam protesting past by admitting to Tim Russert that he'd made a mistake in trusting the people who testified at the Winter Soldier hearings, that he no longer believed that Vietnam veterans had been guilty of all those war crimes he accused them of committing?
The answer is that Kerry would have been elected President of the United States on November 2, 2004. The Swift Boat Vets would never have been heard. Admiral Hoffman started the group because of comments Kerry made about him in
Tour of Duty; as recently as 1996 Hoffman had supported Kerry in his political campaigns. Kerry's not spending Christmas in Cambodia would have been a lot harder sell to the media without the quite obvious fact that
Tour of Duty never mentioned his boat crossing the border, and that was the one thing that gave the Swift Boat Vets credibility right off the bat, that one of their first charges stuck to Kerry and could not be explained away.
But if we buy that Kerry would have been elected President by just avoiding a few simple mistakes, what does that say about our guy? What does that say about our side? Most Republicans think President Bush ran a solid campaign. Certainly the convention was a masterpiece. About the only stumble I can remember along the way is when the staff gave him quaaludes before the first debate.
If we accept that Kerry was a lousy candidate who ran a lousy campaign, then our candidate is, as Harry Reid put it, a loser. A loser who got lucky and won, but would have been beaten like a bongo by a more nimble opponent.
Now we can mutter "What about the mainstream media throwing in the towel on objectivity and balance?" Well, the obvious question there is do we believe that they're going to stop, or that they just started? No, so it's just part of the landscape, something we have to factor into our calculations.
I may get drummed out of the Legion of Kerry Haters for this, but I think Kerry was a solid candidate who ran a very good campaign. He did make some mistakes, but in retrospect they may not have been that harmful, and some may have been calculated mistakes.
Let's remember what Kerry was facing after he finished off the field in the Democratic primaries: An incumbent, wartime President who was presiding over a period of low unemployment, low inflation and low interest rates. He was a sitting Senator, and those guys almost never succeed in making the leap. He was from Massachusetts and had a ridiculously liberal voting record. He had managed to piss off a large segment of Vietnam veterans.
So with all that he was facing, how is it that going into the Democratic convention in late July he was dead even or slightly ahead in the polls? How is it that at the end, a switch of about 60,000 votes in Ohio would have won him the big job?
The answer is that he got every single vote from his base. He didn't turn his back on his anti-Vietnam War buddies when he had the chance with Russert because he knew that much like Jane Fonda, he wasn't going to win back supporters among the Vietnam vet community with an apology 32 years later.
He did of course lots of things that did not appeal to the center or center-right, which encouraged Kerry Haters like me to say he was running a lousy campaign. But at the end of the day he nearly triumphed against tough odds, so he did not run a bad campaign after all. It seems to me that our side has to accept that, or accept that we don't really have a mandate to govern. I'll take the first choice.
