Joseph Sobran’s
Washington Watch

The Bullwinkle and Rocky Ticket

(Reprinted from the issue of August 12, 2004)

John Kerry failed to get the expected “bounce” in the polls after the Democrats’ convention, and it’s hardly inside stuff to say his campaign now has an aura of doom. Everyone agreed that his acceptance speech was one of his better oratorical efforts, yet nobody seems to have found it inspiring. He talked about his “faith,” but gave no hint of what he has faith in; talked about his military record, but didn’t define his position on the Iraq war; talked about his family (who in turn talked movingly about his rescue of a drowning hamster); and talked about his long political career hardly at all.

At the end of his speech, even the most attentive listener would be hard put to say what he stands for. I also read the text of the speech, and I still don’t know.

This is Kerry’s problem. He’s less a candidate than an abstraction. He has many variations, but no theme. The Economist, the intelligent British newsweekly, tried to sum Kerry up in three pages, but while studying his career respectfully, was as unable to define him as the American press. If even those who have followed his public life in detail can’t say with certainty what he stands for, it’s no wonder the voters aren’t sure. All we know is that he has shown more concern for hamsters than for human fetuses (though of course he is “personally opposed” to abortion and will do all in his power to keep it legal).

Kerry’s campaign is almost entirely negative. Not nasty negative; just negative in the way an absence is negative. He won the Democratic nomination because he wasn’t Howard Dean; he is counting on winning the presidency because he isn’t George W. Bush. He is running as an undefined alternative. This might work against a Herbert Hoover during the Great Depression, but it won’t do against a president who, for all his flaws and failures, has a strong, clear profile.

I myself think Bush has been a disastrous president, but most of his disasters are time bombs — the huge deficits, for example — whose effects won’t touch most voters before November. In fact, they are designed to fall on people who don’t vote yet. Or haven’t even been born yet. (Bush may want to protect the unborn, but he’s left some unpleasant surprises for them.)
 
A Hokey Refrain

After eight years of Bill Clinton, a born politician, the Democrats are offering the sort of candidate Clinton supplanted: another Michael Dukakis, a Massachusetts liberal trying to escape the liberal label. Kerry was in fact Dukakis’s lieutenant governor, but he has obviously learned nothing from his mentor’s crushing defeat by the elder Bush in 1988.

Kerry’s strongest argument against Bush is that he’s not a real conservative. This would be an excellent theme for a challenger in a Republican primary, but it’s a strange argument for a liberal Democrat to make, and Kerry is hardly the man to make it. I can’t recall any president being denied re-election because of voter indignation over deficits; Ronald Reagan ran up big deficits too, and carried 49 states in 1984.

Clinton had the discernment to distance himself from the likes of Sister Souljah, the raucous rapper, in 1992; he gave the Democrats a new tone, oriented to the middle class. But into the vacuum that is the Kerry campaign, at the Democrats’ convention, came a sort of underclass renaissance, with Al Sharpton bellowing and various rappers supplying the sound track music. The convention’s TV ratings were meager; maybe the viewers knew what to expect. But higher ratings might have sealed Kerry’s fate.

Kerry also chose as his running mate the other Democrat who wasn’t Howard Dean, John Edwards. Maybe Edwards provided a bit of charm back in an Iowa winter, but it’s lost on me. He reminds me of a cheerful cartoon rodent; the ticket, come to think of it, looks a bit like Bullwinkle and Rocky. His speech was eagerly awaited, but he spoke to the country as if it were a huge backwoods jury, descending to the hokey refrain, “Hope is on the way!” with the delegates dutifully joining the chant. Kerry picked it up in his own acceptance speech. It was his nearest approach to a campaign theme.
 
An Evasive Strategy

The convention, like Kerry’s campaign, strangely avoided real discussion of the most obvious issue: the War on Terror. It barely mentioned the Mideast. Kerry made a passing swipe at Saudi influence on the Bush administration (an echo of Michael Moore’s film Fahrenheit 9/11?); Edwards made an equally brief promise to protect Israeli security. Otherwise, treatment of the whole subject was oblique, though the party’s prevalent antiwar sentiment was clear enough.

The entire party is participating in Kerry’s evasive strategy. It’s a liberal party, united chiefly by its fanatical belief in the sacramental status of abortion; but it wants to sound vaguely conservative at the same time, at least until November 2.

This is an awkward position to be in, and Kerry, like Dukakis, lacks the Clintonian touch, the charm and finesse to disguise embarrassing contradictions while sounding sincere. Clinton could address a crowd split evenly between vegetarians and cannibals and get a standing ovation at the end; both sides would be convinced that at heart, he sympathized with them. But Kerry can’t find even an illusory common ground in a country closely and sharply divided.

Bush at least speaks in decisive platitudes; Kerry is said to have a better grasp of nuances, complications, ambiguities, and the like. This may be fine for an IQ test, but subtle distinctions don’t win elections. The 2004 election pits a believer against a doubter. In 1952 and 1956 the Democrats served up an eloquent doubter, Adlai Stevenson, against a war hero, Dwight Eisenhower; Eisenhower ate him alive both times. Kerry and the Democrats are portraying Kerry as a war hero too, but he lacks Ike’s stature as well as his famous smile. (Kerry’s smile looks as if it hurts his facial muscles, which seem constructed to impart solemnity.)

Who, really, is John Kerry? That people are still asking this question so late in the campaign is a bad sign for the Democrats. All we really know is that several of his fellow veterans and one hamster owe him their lives.


“A thing worth doing is worth doing badly,” Chesterton said. Most Americans now agree that a thing worth doing should be done (however badly) by the government, observes SOBRAN’S. If you have not seen my monthly newsletter yet, give my office a call at 800-513-5053 and request a free sample, or better yet, subscribe for two years for just $85. New subscribers get two gifts with their subscription. More details can be found at the Subscription page of my website.

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Joseph Sobran