John Kerry, true to form (National Post, August 04, 2004)

 

I didn't watch most of the Democratic convention in Boston last week. If it's scary political brainwashing I'm after, there's always the new version of The Manchurian Candidate, where I can at least be entertained at the same time. Besides, the sight of "hear-no-evil" Jimmy Carter and "hate-whitey" Al Sharpton sitting together as honoured guests would give any conservative the vapours. But with masochistic curiosity, and to measure my cynical predictions against reality, I tuned in for John Kerry and his entourage of mood-builders. And here are some mean-spirited musings.

I was betting last Thursday would be, metaphorically speaking, "Kerry-hokey" night at the Fleet Centre. Sure enough, everyone who got up to sing, including Kerry, all belted out the lyrics to the number-one song on the Democratic hit parade, Have-I-told-you-lately-that-John-Kerry-was-a-war-hero-25-years-ago?

This constant harping on Kerry's war experience should puzzle anyone old enough to remember Vietnam. These cheering, amnesiac Democrats are the very same people who, as young men and women, opposed the Vietnam War, considered draft dodgers the real heroes of that day, and later shunned or scorned the returning Vietnam vets. I can only conclude that the need to hate Bush is so compelling that an option once reviled by liberals has -- solely because Bush rejected it -- become the new template for American patriotism, and the Right Stuff for high office.

If courage in war were the main criterion for the presidency, then wouldn't all the great presidents be soldiers? But there is no pattern. George H.W. Bush was a Second World War hero, Ronald Reagan wasn't. JFK was. FDR wasn't. D-Day commander Ike was liked, but he was a middling president. Conversely, courage in battle is no guarantor of success in politics. Three-limb amputee Max Cleland, Bob Dole and John McCain were all battle-scarred, but couldn't ride their war records to the White House.

In his too-long speech, Kerry said nothing of his post-Vietnam anti-war activism or his 19-year Senate voting record. But that shouldn't surprise us. His Winter Soldier campaign, including throwing away another soldier's medals on the steps of the Capitol, resonates badly with conservative Democrats. And Kerry's flip-flopping voting record is amongst the most inconsistent in congressional history. (As one example amongst many, Kerry voted against the 1991 Gulf War, then for the 2003 Iraq war, but against funding increased military needs to fight it.) As Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney says, "[Kerry] has been my senator for almost two decades ... yet I do not know what he stands for."

Kerry was determined to play it safe. He pushed all the cool buttons in his promises of strength, transparency and collaboration with other world leaders. He kept his finger far away from the hot button of gay marriage.

So with no clear platform and no political history to flaunt, Kerry was left with manly chest-thumping -- the war record -- and rabble-rousing slogans. He closed the loop on John Edwards' zippy "Hope is on the Way" mantra, introduced the night before, with the cutesy bookend, "Help is on the Way." This undignified Tweedledee-Tweedledum twinning leant the duo the unfortunate air of highly motivated paramedics -- or upscale Dukes of Hazzard -- rushing to the scene of a barn on fire. But no matter: By the time Kerry came on stage, the assembly was so wound up, they would have chanted, "Four legs good, two legs bad," like the sheep in George Orwell's Animal Farm.

The dumbed-down "Help is on the Way" seems to have replaced the more presidential-sounding "Let America be America Again," a phrase Kerry-Edwards originally took up as their official slogan when it found favour with several focus groups. An attractive feature of this line of poetry for Kerry, eager to please his enormous Black constituency, is that its author was a Black writer, Langston Hughes, known at the height of his fame in the Thirties and Forties as the "Shakespeare of Harlem."

Unfortunately Hughes was also an unregenerate communist at the time the poem was written. "Let America be America Again," far from being the clarion call to moral reform and renewed patriotism that it suggests, was a diatribe against America, in particular against strutting capitalists like Kerry and Edwards, whom Hughes would have loathed.

(Several publications, such as The Wall Street Journal and FrontPage Magazine, noted Hughes' unsavoury history as a Soviet "useful idiot" who wrote odes to the Stalinist regime, but Kerry insouciantly waved away all criticisms.)

And yet, it seems that just at the time and place the words would have been deployed to greatest exposure, Kerry balked, and "voted" against it. Now there is a pattern familiar to those who take Kerry's record, not just his high-minded phrases, to heart.

© National Post 2004