Kerry Under Pressure for A Blueprint
Compelling Agenda Needed, Experts Say
washingtonpost.com
By Dan Balz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 28, 2004; Page A01
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Bill Clinton ran for president in 1992 as a New Democrat, and eight years later, George W. Bush ran as a compassionate conservative. But even after presumptively winning the Democratic nomination, Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.) has yet to put a distinctive stamp on his candidacy, his party or the shape of a Kerry presidency.
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He has one of the most liberal voting records in the Senate, but on some key votes in the 1990s and in statements in the years before launching his candidacy, Kerry edged toward the centrist policies of the Democratic Leadership Council. In the heat of the Democratic nomination battle, when anger toward President Bush and opposition to the war in Iraq were dominant attitudes among activists, his rhetoric often tilted to the left, but not always his positions.
Kerry has emerged from the Democratic primaries as the "generic Democrat" at a time when the pragmatic goal of defeating Bush has trumped philosophical differences within the party. He embraces establishment Democratic thinking that more government spending is needed on domestic programs but that deficits are a serious problem, that U.S. foreign policy should be muscular but also multilateral when possible, that free trade is desirable but with a growing list of reservations.
Those positions reflect a consensus within the party, but also a fuzziness in their particulars. As the general election begins and Democrats play to a broader audience, Kerry is under pressure to define himself clearly and to offer voters a post-Clinton blueprint for a Democratic presidency.
Kerry began to answer that demand Friday with a speech about international taxation, and he pledged to sketch out a governing vision over the next few months. His challenge, according to sympathetic Democrats, will be to distill a laundry list of campaign promises and some seemingly contradictory statements into a succinct and compelling agenda.
"My greatest worry about the Kerry candidacy is that the competence and confidence it's demonstrated early on in rapid reaction to news of the day will come at the expense of an organized and systematic effort to tell the American people what John Kerry would do as president of the United States," said William Galston, a University of Maryland professor and former Clinton domestic adviser. "By the end of the campaign, if people can't spontaneously name two or three things that are big things that he would do differently, then I think the campaign will not have succeeded in getting across the whole message."
Kerry won his party's nomination by making himself acceptable to the various factions within the Democratic coalition, reflecting through his candidacy the fissures over issues that divide Democrats rather than resolving them through a vigorous debate with his rivals.
The party has stamped Kerry's candidacy more than Kerry has put his imprint on the party, with Democratic divisions over Iraq personified in his position on the war, with its differences over trade exemplified by his statements along the campaign trail.
Inside the party, there is no great pressure for Kerry to define a dramatic new direction or to resolve big differences. Eight years of the Clinton-Gore administration reduced the gulf between left and right in the party, and unity around the cause of denying Bush a second term has submerged debates about what is next. Organized labor, for example, rushed to endorse Kerry when it was clear he would be the nominee, despite a voting record on trade at odds with labor's interests. Many Democratic voters who disagreed with Kerry over his vote authorizing Bush to go to war in Iraq found him a more acceptable candidate than former Vermont governor Howard Dean, whose opposition to the war rallied the party last year.
But Democratic strategists say Kerry's campaign should not take the harmony in the party as a reason not to provide a more sharply etched profile of what his presidency would mean -- particularly for the small but decisive pool of undecided and independent voters.
"A lot of those people do not share the anger at Bush," said Mandy Grunwald, who worked for Clinton in 1992 and Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (Conn.) in this year's primaries. "They have mixed feelings about him. They have concerns about Iraq and concerns about the economy. But they're torn. What we need to do is speak not just to people who are angry at Bush, but to people who are torn."
Kerry has emerged from the primaries at the philosophical center of the party if not the country. His greatest strengths are his biography and the perception among Democrats that he has the experience and credentials to defeat Bush. A strategist who worked for one of Kerry's rivals said he worried about whether that profile of what he called the generic Democratic position will be enough to attract swing voters in November.
"Can he get the new folks? Can he make it bigger than just himself? That's an open question," said this strategist, who declined to be identified because he was reluctant to publicly question the party's nominee.
Democrats say that the challenge for Kerry is far easier than what Clinton faced in 1992, a time when the Democratic Party was suspect to swing voters because of its record on defense, taxes, crime and some social issues. Clinton knew he had to redefine the party to make himself acceptable to voters in his effort to defeat President George H.W. Bush.
But if Kerry does not have to define what the Democratic Party is not, which was part of Clinton's task, he must give the party an updated image on foreign policy, where his advocacy of multilateralism leaves many questions unanswered, and on the economy, where his standard pledge of returning to the policies of the Clinton years overlooks the fact that conditions have changed dramatically, and not simply because of Bush's policies.
Democratic Leadership Council President Bruce Reed argued that Bush has given Kerry more maneuvering room to define himself favorably to voters in the center of the political spectrum. "Bush has abandoned compassionate conservatism for all practical purposes," Reed said. "He's given up trying to define himself as an acceptable centrist. So I think the combination of representing a party that has no deep philosophical fissures and running against a guy who's abandoned the middle leaves Kerry a huge swath of philosophical real estate to occupy."
Republicans disagree that Bush has given up the center, and contend that it will be difficult for a Massachusetts politician so closely tied to Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) to cast himself as anything but a liberal Democrat in many of the battleground states in the Midwest, South or West. A new poll from the Pew Research Center found that public impressions of Kerry have shifted to the left in the past three months, with 40 percent describing him as liberal, compared with 28 percent in January.
Complicating Kerry's effort is the fact that he will be defining himself and his party in the heat of the general election, rather than at the start of his candidacy, as Clinton did. With Democratic unity essential to Kerry's chances of winning in November, he may be reluctant to offer a clear philosophical direction to his candidacy, although in his speech on international taxation, his advisers stressed that his plan contained a tax-rate cut for corporations and noted how unusual it was for a Democrat to advocate such a policy.
The Democratic nomination battle answered who Democrats want to lead them far more definitively than it answered where they want to be led, Galston said, noting that candidates advocating a sharp turn away from Clintonism were defeated, but so too was the candidate who most explicitly called for an embrace of Clinton's policies.
"Kerry was acceptable to all the factions of the party because it was hard to type-cast him as Old Democrat or New Democrat, and it's hard to type-cast the party as New Democrat or Old Democrat," Galston said. "Bill Clinton changed some things, but he didn't change all things. [This is] a party that is uneasily poised between the parts of its past it wants to cling to and a future that it has not fully defined."
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