Why He's Sinking
Kerry's Problem: Kerry
Andrew Sullivan
Why is John Kerry doing so poorly? By any measure, the news from Iraq is grim and seems to be getting grimmer. In several key swing states, economic anxiety is high. A small majority still declares in most polls that the country is on the wrong track and that the president does not deserve re-election. And yet the polls continue to show a Bush edge - and the latest Gallup poll puts Bush's lead well into double digits.
There are many theories, but the simplest explanation may be the best. John Kerry is a lousy candidate. Just watch him. His voice is a downer; his body-language is stooped and defensive; he appears aloof and prolix. He never says in ten words what he can say in thirty. He sums up a lot of the characteristics of many failed Democratic candidates over the years - from the cramped vision of Michael Dukakis to the torpid drone of Walter Mondale. For a while, his tedium seemed to work in his favor. There's enough anti-Bush sentiment in the country to push any non-Bush candidate into the White House; and the more people concentrated on Bush, the more they swung toward his opponent, whoever it was. But there's no way you can run a low-visibility presidential campaign. And when people took a close look at Kerry, they winced. I mean, even Democrats winced. I'm surrounded by Democrats and I have yet to find a single one who actually believes that John Kerry will be a great president. The general sentiment? He'll do. And we have to get Bush out.
It's not enough. Kerry also suffers from the fact that he's been a senator for twenty years. If you're not a logorrheic, indecisive ponderer after two decades in the U.S. Senate, then you're probably a cocaine addict. These guys give hour-long Ciceronian addresses to empty chambers on a regular basis. They don't just vote on bills - but on amendments to amendments to the second reading of bills. Nuance is everything; legislative compromise is vital. And if you then have to run for president, your opponent has access to an interminable list of votes that can be skewed to make them seem damning. If you voted for, say, five different appropriation bills in 1988 but against the sixth, and if the sixth contained spending on a military toilet in northern Germany, then you can expect a thirty-second ad in a subsequent presidential campaign describing you as someone who sold out the troops in their hour of need. It's pointless trying to complain. The minute you say that things were more complicated than that, you become a nuanced flip-flopper, unable to be a commander-in-chief. So you give up trying. There's a reason senators very rarely run for president and even more rarely win. And Kerry is now finding out.
Kerry is also ham-string by the two central issues in the campaign. On Iraq, the base of his party has been opposed to war for a year and a half. But the public at large is more positive; and the swing-voters are restless about Iraq but unsure what the next step should be. So Kerry can either be more hawkish than the president and risk alienating his most fervent supporters; or he can become Howard Dean and lose the center; or he can straddle and end up seeming like someone who cannot be decisive in wartime. You can see this pattern in his votes on the matter. He voted to give the president the authority to go to war against Saddam (because he feared an easy victory in Iraq); then he voted against the $87 billion in military and reconstruction aid for the occupation (because he was battling Howard Dean in the primaries). So he was for the war and then against providing the money to pay for it. Actually, it was even more complicated than that. He voted for the $87 billion, when it was tied to reneging on some of Bush's tax cuts (a proposal that quickly died); and then he voted against it, when it stood alone. Hence perhaps his most famous quote of the campaign yet: "I voted for the $87 billion before I voted against it." If you're Karl Rove and trying to find a way to tag Kerry as a flip-flopper, you dont get better gift horses than that one.
And what does Kerry propose now? Bush has essentially followed Kerry's advice for the last year - begging for more help from allies, turning over sovereignty, fighting the insurgency, and so forth. And the situation is still unraveling. Kerry has every right to lambaste the president for incompetence in war-management. But voters want to know what he would do in contrast to Bush. The answer is: not much different, but I'd get more help from the French. That's not a winning position.
Moreover, Kerry's campaign hawkishness on Iraq is in stark contrast to his long record of dovishness. He made his name opposing the Vietnam war; he opposed every Reagan intervention in the 1980s and was a stern foe of the Contras in Nicaragua; he was in favor of the nuclear freeze; he opposed the first Gulf War; he voted to cut intelligence funding and many weapons systems over the years. And he tried to overcome this impression not by telling people why 9/11 had changed his perspective, but by emphasizing his own military service in Vietnam. Another mistake, in retrospect. Many liberals and Democrats believe the Vietnam war was a moral stain on America. Kerry now wanted them to celebrate his participation in it? And, of course, by raising Vietnam as an issue, he also lent some oxygen to the bitter Vietnam vets who ran the ads accusing him of faking his war medals. It became an almighty, confusing mess, and the convention failed to give the candidate much of a bounce.
As for the economy, Kerry is equally at sea. Bush's record is mediocre, but his record deficits mean that Kerry can propose few vote-winning programs without being accused of being fiscally reckless. To push through his healthcare proposal, he has to raise taxes on the rich - allowing Bush to claim he's an old-fashioned tax and spend liberal. And neither candidate has any real plan to improve wages or the economy as a whole. So it's a draw on an issue on which the president should be deeply vulnerable.
To make matters worse, Kerry has helped Bush press his own simple campaign theme. Bush is campaigning as a plain-spoken simple guy who knows what he believes and sticks to it. This is only partly true. Bush has zig-zagged on any number of issues, from free trade to Fallujah. But compared to Kerry, he seems very sure of himself, for all his failings. A typical email I got from readers of my blog read like this: "Just because Bush is not the man you wanted him to be, doesn't mean that John Kerry is. I mean he's John Kerry. President John Kerry. I think that sounds worse than President Al Gore, and that gave me frigging nightmares." Here's another: "Kerry would be a frightfully indecisive leader, paralyzed like Jimmy Carter. For all his foibles, we need Bush's steel spine and singularity of purpose." Better to be strong and wrong than indecisive and paralyzed. I suspect that that is now the calculation forming in many people's minds.
That is not to say the race is over. The fundamentals still point to a very weak incumbent. Last week, Kerry was beginning to find his voice in decrying the Bush record. This was a strong passage on Thursday in an address to the National Guard: "[The president] did not tell you that with each passing day, we're seeing more chaos, more violence, more indiscriminate killings [in Iraq]. He did not tell you that with each passing week, our enemies are getting bolder ‹ that Pentagon officials report that entire regions of Iraq are now in the hands of terrorists and extremists. He did not tell you that with each passing month, stability and security seem farther and farther away... You deserve a president who will not play politics with national security, who will not ignore his own intelligence, while living in a fantasy world of spin, and who will give the American people the truth about the challenge our brave men and women face on the front lines."
It's a good line of attack; and he may get better at it. His previous opponents have all under-estimated Kerry's capacity to focus and fight back when all seems lost. The debates could be his chance to break out. But the weeks are ticking by. And you can feel the panic in Democratic ranks rising a little higher with every passing day.
September 19, 2004, Sunday Times.
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