Posted on 01/22/2004 12:51:23 PM PST by .cnI redruM
Massachusetts Senator John Kerry likes to say that, if he's the Democratic nominee and President Bush wants to make the election a referendum on national security, he has just three words to say: "Bring It On!" But what if Kerry becomes the nominee and Bush wants to make the election more than a referendum on national security? What would the Republicans bring on then?
In all likelihood, they would hammer Kerry for his opposition to mandatory minimum sentences for dealers who sell drugs to children and for voting against the death penalty for terrorists. They would mock his efforts to provide cash benefits to drug addicts and alcoholics, and his onetime opposition to a modest work requirement for welfare recipients. They would trash him for supporting more than half a trillion dollars in tax increases-including hikes in gas taxes and Social Security taxes on ordinary Americans-while accepting free housing and other goodies for himself from friendly influence-peddlers. They would even point out that, when Kerry served as lieutenant governor under one Michael S. Dukakis, Massachusetts famously furloughed more than 500 murderers and sex offenders under a program Kerry later defended as tough.
In fact, they already have.
In 1996, Republican Governor William Weld ran an aggressive campaign for Kerry's Massachusetts Senate seat, blasting him as a soft-on-crime, soft-on-welfare, crazed-on-taxes paleoliberal. He accused Kerry of siding with murderers and junkies over victims and taxpayers; he ran one ad with the slogan: "free rent for kerry. higher taxes for us."
It didn't quite work. Weld was the wrong guy, 1996 was the wrong year, and Massachusetts was the wrong state for a chest-thumping, red-meat, ditch-the-wuss conservative message. Kerry relentlessly linked Weld to the Republican bogeymen Newt Gingrich, Trent Lott, and Bob Dole, energizing his state's powerful labor unions and yellow-dog Democratic establishment, and he managed to escape with a seven-point victory in a state where Bill Clinton thrashed Dole by 34 points. But George W. Bush is not Bill Weld, 2004 is not 1996, and the United States most assuredly is not Massachusetts.
John Kerry fought honorably in Vietnam and had the courage and conscience to oppose the war when he came home. He has a compelling resumé, a spectacularly rich wife, and a craggy Andrew Jacksonesque face that was made for Mount Rushmore. He is definitely no Ted Kennedy (even if they do seem joined at the hip these days) or Howard Dean. He's a proud member of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, and he voted for nafta, welfare reform, and the authorization of force in Iraq. "He has spent the last seven months answering ridiculous charges on whether he's Bush Lite," says Sarah Bianchi, Kerry's policy director. "He's not the lefty in this race." In Iowa, Kerry successfully sold himself as the electable alternative to Dean, as a war hero with foreign and domestic policy experience who refuses to raise taxes on the middle class, a rugged ice-hockey player who can't be caricatured as an out-of-the-mainstream latte liberal.
But that is exactly how Kerry was portrayed by Weld, a centrist Republican who actually shared Kerry's support for gay rights, partial-birth abortion, the National Endowment for the Arts, and affirmative action. Weld never even mentioned that Kerry was one of only 14 senators to vote against the Defense of Marriage Act, or that he sponsored the first federal gay civil rights bill, or that he voted to protect partial-birth abortion-stances popular with his constituents (and with this magazine) but not with the American electorate. George W. Bush would.
"I'm sure the Republicans would attack him as a liberal," Bianchi says. "Even if every vote he had ever taken was right in line with the American public, they'd attack him as a liberal. They'd do the same thing to John Edwards or Joe Lieberman. They'd do it to anyone."
She's right. It is probably inevitable that Karl Rove and the $100 million-plus Bush campaign juggernaut will try to tag any Democratic opponent as a Chablis-sipping, leftist elitist. But the record of Kerry, who has represented a liberal state in the Senate for 20 years and has often voted accordingly, provides a good deal more fodder for such attacks than the studied centrism of Lieberman or the shorter resumés of Edwards or Wesley Clark. Moreover, Weld has already shown what these attacks would look like-even with his far-right hand tied behind his back. Yes, some of Weld's punches landed below Kerry's belt. But they were rooted in facts, and Rove would hit much harder. This is one reason long-serving senators have so much trouble getting elected president; they have to vote on bills they did not design, and those votes end up in opposition research.
I helped cover the Weld-Kerry race for The Boston Globe, and I happen to have the Weld campaign's 95-page dossier of opposition research. I'm sure Rove has a copy, too. I don't know if the attacks that ultimately backfired on Weld in the Bay State, where one-eighth of the electorate was Republican in 1996, would work for Bush in the rest of the United States, where one-third of the electorate is Republican in 2004. But I suspect that, if Kerry is the nominee, we'll find out.
Senator Kerry describes himself as a deficit hawk, so, in 1994, he was furious when the deficit-busting Concord Coalition gave him a failing grade of 29 percent for fiscal responsibility. In a blustery response to the Globe's Jill Zuckman, he complained (with justification) that the Coalition's methodology had made him look less responsible than he really is: "It doesn't reflect ... my support for a 50-cent increase in the gas tax." He was right. It didn't. But, once the Globe corrected that omission, Weld took the opportunity to blast Kerry's support for a 50-cent increase in the gas tax almost daily during the Senate race.
In a campaign devoted almost exclusively to his "holy trinity" of crime, welfare, and taxes, taxes were Weld's holiest of holies. And Kerry provided plenty of ammunition. Kerry had been the number-two official in the Dukakis regime that raised state gas taxes two cents in 1983; he had supported a budget that would have raised federal gas taxes six cents in 1990; he had voted for President Clinton's budget, which did raise gas taxes four cents, in 1993. "What is it with you and the gas tax, senator?" Weld grilled him during one of their seven debates. "That's not exactly a tax reserved for the wealthy." As Kerry pointed out, there are excellent fiscal, environmental, and international arguments for gas taxes; they raise revenue, discourage fuel consumption, and reduce dependence on foreign oil. But, politically, gas taxes are a loser-especially now that Kerry is positioning himself as the anti-Dean Democrat who refuses to raise taxes on the middle class.
Which is not something Kerry has always refused to do. Kerry insisted in one of his debates with Weld that he had never voted to raise income taxes on people earning less than $100,000 per year, but the Clinton budget that passed by the margin of Kerry's vote raised taxes on millions of middle-income retirees by subjecting more of their Social Security benefits to taxation. Kerry himself had acknowledged this in his speech on the Senate floor: "The bill also raises taxes-seventy-five percent from those who make over one hundred thousand dollars and twenty-five percent from those who make between thirty thousand and one hundred thousand dollars. I wish we did not need to raise taxes, but every serious economist ... has admitted that the budget cannot be balanced without increasing taxes somewhat." Kerry also voted to eliminate a $500-per-child tax credit from the 1996 Senate budget resolution-a credit even liberals like Barbara Boxer and Tom Harkin voted to preserve. He supported the 1988 catastrophic health insurance bill that imposed a surtax on Medicare recipients of up to $800 per year, then admitted the surtax was "unfair" when it was repealed unanimously the next year. And he told me in a 1996 interview that it was "wacky" that Social Security taxes did not apply to income over $62,700-the same interview in which he said Congress should consider raising the retirement age and means-testing benefits.
During the campaign, Kerry argued that Weld was taking his votes and statements out of context, that the Clinton budget deal was leading the United States back to balanced budgets, that the ill-fated catastrophic health bill had overwhelming bipartisan support, that senators often have to make up-or-down choices about bills and amendments that might not be entirely to their liking. He called Weld's continuous harping on the gas tax "pandering of the worst order," and claimed that, overall, he had voted to cut taxes on workers earning less than $75,000 per year. Those were all reasonable arguments. "See, governor, what you keep doing-you've done it in every debate, and you're doing it in your negative advertising that you've started-is you take a little individual vote, and you play a game with it," Kerry complained in one of the debates.
That game, however, is called politics. And it seems plausible that, if Kerry is still playing come the general election, Bush will mention taxes now and then, and might not always provide the full context for Kerry's votes. Bush might even be tempted to repeat that memorable phrase: "I wish we did not need to raise taxes, but ... ."
Incidentally, now that he's running nationally, Kerry no longer supports a 50-cent gas-tax hike. "The world we're living in today is very different," says staffer Michael Meehan, who worked for Kerry in 1996 as well.
Their only disability was an addiction to drugs and alcohol," the announcer grimly declared. "Yet they still received federal checks. Federal investigators called the system 'out of control.'" The grainy black-and-white Weld ad showed an addict using his benefits to get high, then an alcoholic drowning his sorrows at federal expense. "Incredibly, John Kerry twice introduced legislation to keep paying monthly checks to alcoholics and drug addicts whose only disability was their addiction!"
It was an edgy spot, savaged by Kerry as "the most duplicitous and brazen distortion I've ever seen." But it was factually accurate. On September 8, 1994, Kerry offered two amendments to a Senate welfare-reform bill, both designed "to provide Supplemental Security Income benefits to persons who are disabled by reason of drug or alcohol abuse." Kerry argued that Weld's attacks were misleading because the program's excesses had been corrected, addicts would have been required to seek treatment in order to receive benefits in the future, and many impoverished Vietnam veterans who were still struggling with substance-abuse problems would have gone hungry without them. But the program was shut down despite his objections. And Weld never tired of pointing out that Kerry had tried to give cash to crack-heads.
Welfare and crime were not particularly urgent issues in the 1996 election. Welfare rolls and crime statistics were both declining, and Clinton had signed welfare reform and crime bills with Kerry's support. But Weld used both issues to portray Kerry as a hopelessly naïve liberal, showering money on druggies in the hope they'd do the right thing, coddling criminals instead of locking them up and killing them dead. Once again, he cherry-picked the most liberal-sounding nuggets from Kerry's voting record and public statements. But the fact that they were cherry-picked did not make them sound any less liberal.
Weld's favorite Kerry quotation came from a debate over a 1988 welfare reform bill: "It contains provisions troublesome to me, such as the sixteen-hour weekly work requirement for two-parent families receiving benefits." Sixteen hours per week was troublesome? In a debate, Kerry explained that he wanted to focus reforms on single-parent families, but, as Weld pointed out, in two-parent families, it makes even more sense that at least one parent should work. Kerry did support the final GOP welfare-reform bill in 1996, but not before voting against "learnfare" rules allowing states to deny benefits to parents whose children blew off school and a "family cap" that stopped states from boosting benefits for recipients who had more children while on welfare. "You're elbow-deep in the entitlement mentality," Weld taunted him.
Weld hit even harder on criminal justice issues, airing ads cluttered with menacing gang members and slamming jail doors. "John Kerry has voted against mandatory sentences for vicious criminals selling drugs to kids," one proclaimed, as a syringe dropped to the street. And it was true-Kerry voted against amendments to establish mandatory minimums for gang activity, gun offenses, and, yes, selling drugs to minors. Kerry's argument that mandatory sentences tie the hands of judges was certainly a legitimate one, but he didn't do himself any favors by appearing to make excuses for drug crimes in his Senate speech: "What happens if it is the minor's best friend, who is also a minor, who sells the drugs? Or what happens if it is somebody who is twenty years old, a college friend who has never been in trouble, who happens to be at a party, and who sold some drugs to another minor? ... We have people today in jail under mandatory sentencing provisions for drug use who have been there for four or five years, who are so barely culpable it is sad." If Kerry is the nominee, the phrase "so barely culpable it is sad" might start rolling off the tongues of a few presidential surrogates. They might also mention that Kerry was one of only seven senators who voted to kill an amendment requiring random drug and alcohol testing for airline pilots and other safety-related personnel in the transportation industry.
Kerry is also philosophically opposed to capital punishment. He has voted against the death penalty for murderous drug traffickers, murderous carjackers, and cop killers. It's a courageous stand, but it didn't work too well for Dukakis against the first George Bush; even Massachusetts residents overwhelmingly support capital punishment, and the second George Bush was of course the leading practitioner of capital punishment in Texas. In one debate, Weld marveled that Kerry even voted against the death penalty for terrorists, but Kerry still refused to budge, accusing Weld of grandstanding and demagoguery, arguing that foreign nations might refuse to extradite captured terrorists if the United States were to adopt a federal death penalty. "Your policy is a terrorist-protection policy," Kerry snorted.
Now it's Kerry's policy, too. He changed his mind before he started running for president and now favors a death-penalty exception for terrorists. "The terrorists have declared war against America," Meehan explains. "The rules of engagement are different now." Bianchi says Kerry now supports mandatory minimums for drug dealers who sell to children as well.
Kerry's liberal record was not the only issue that hurt him against Weld and could again in a race against Bush. In one Weld-Kerry debate, Boston Herald columnist Marjory Eagan confronted the senator with an observation that would have been startling if it hadn't become so commonplace: "I wonder if you've given any thought to why voters don't seem that fond of you as a person." Kerry responded that he is sometimes too aloof, but, for whatever reason, he does seem to rub people the wrong way (see Michael Crowley, "The Makeover," June 3, 2002).
In any case, Kerry's character became a vital issue in his race against Weld. At first, both candidates agreed that elections should not be popularity contests; Weld declared that voters didn't care "which one of us is Betty Co-ed's idea of a date." But then Globe and Herald reporters-not me-started digging up dirt on Kerry's finances. First, it came out that his supporters had treated him to meals and more lucrative freebies in the '80s: a car he "leased" for 16 months without any payments, a ritzy condo he rented for $200 per month from a friendly developer, a no-risk $21,000 real estate windfall arranged by a top fund-raiser, a lobbyist's $8,000-per-month waterfront apartment where he crashed without paying. Then it came out that Kerry had given less than 1 percent of his earnings to charity before marrying Teresa Heinz. And, when Kerry claimed he had been strapped for cash because his kids were in private school, it came out that he had bought a handmade, ruby red, $8,600 Ducati motorcycle the same year he had given only $175 to charity. "What is he doing with all his money?" Weld asked. "I mean, he's making one hundred thirty thousand dollars a year. He's got free meals, free cars, and free housing. And he can't throw a few bucks to the United Way? Come on!"
It wasn't Watergate, but the scandal did suggest a political version of the entitlement mentality, a kind of Ducati liberalism. "That's the beautiful thing about campaigns," Meehan says. "You learn lessons. He said, 'You know what, I didn't do so well with contributions. I'm going to do better in the future.'" And he has done better. Of course, when he made that vow to do better, he had just married a ketchup heiress worth half a billion dollars.
It bears remembering, though, that despite the withering attacks Kerry faced in 1996 he won, beating a charming, successful governor who had just been reelected with 71 percent of the vote. Kerry was lucky that a right-wing candidate siphoned off 3 percent of the Republican vote, and that Clinton campaigned for him, and that many voters wanted to keep Weld as governor. Kerry was especially lucky that Weld ran a 1994 campaign of Republican anger in sunny Democratic 1996, alienating women with his caveman tone and exclusive focus on three macho-man issues. But Kerry was not merely lucky. In one debate, Weld unexpectedly introduced the mother of a slain police officer and challenged Kerry to look her in the eye and explain why her son's life was worth less than his murderer's life. It was the kind of raw death-penalty moment that destroyed Dukakis. But Kerry shot Weld a nasty glare and softly responded: "I know something about killing. I don't like killing. That's just a personal belief I have." It would be fun to watch Bush try to respond to that.
Ultimately, electability is like the New England weather: Everybody talks about it, but nobody really knows how to predict it months in advance. John Kerry knows that, if he does become the Democratic nominee, Bush is going to do more than bring it on. He's going to pour it on, in ways that Weld never could. "Of course they'd attack," Meehan says. "John Kerry is ready for those attacks. He'll push right back. And he'll talk about his service to his country." For Kerry's team, that's what makes him electable, much more than the specifics of his record. In fact, his aides are already contrasting Kerry's early years as a warrior, protester, prosecutor, and legislator to Bush's early years as a drinker. At least he had a record, they say. "George Bush was missing for a year in the National Guard," Bianchi says. "That didn't make him unelectable." Then again, Bush didn't spend 20 years as a Massachusetts senator.
People say Kerry is strong, but I don't see it -- as this article suggests, he's got beaucoup liabilities.
This thing ain't over yet.
Dean defended himself by accusing Bush of doing the same thing, but Dean was wrong.
He's getting good at being wrong.
Their pre-Senate record might also come into play for a Presidential run--especially if it reveals a rabidly Marxist sympathy and a strong support for the Communist Viet Cong flag.
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On the campaign trail, White House wannabe Sen. John Forbes Kerry regularly mentions his Vietnam War combat experience, during which he received three purple hearts, the Silver Star and Bronze Star. |
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