WASHINGTON, 6 March 2004 — Forget about his record in Vietnam. The real question after Super Tuesday is this: What did John F. Kerry do in the culture wars?
Tuesday, the senator from Massachusetts showed that he can charm a broad swath of Democrats nationally. New Yorkers have grown especially fond of him in the last few weeks as he worked the state with a credible message about jobs and trade.
He triumphed in New York, where he held rallies in Harlem and Queens with an informal sort of warmth that does not necessarily show up on TV. To me, he looked comfortable and real on the campaign trail while John Edwards, his chief rival, appeared pleasant enough but as plastic as a McDonald’s place setting.
But now that Kerry has all but locked up the Democratic nomination, how skillfully can he handle the unforgiving Bush campaign machine? Remember how it smeared Gov. Michael Dukakis in 1988 as a befuddled doofus who stood to the left of Marx and Lenin as he foolishly ran Massachusetts right into the ground? Who’s to say that won’t happen to Kerry? Not me.
Consider the surreal scene that happened in Manhattan on Sunday morning during the Democratic debate on CBS.
“Are you a liberal?’’ New York Times reporter Elizabeth Bumiller asked Kerry. She had just noted that the National Journal recently ranked him tops in terms of Senate liberalism. Now this was an especially cruel kind of torture. If he said, “Yeah — what’s wrong with that?’’ he gives Karl Rove and George W. Bush the best sound bite of the 2004 Republican campaign. And he also scares the bejabbers out of all those Americans who think liberals were placed on this Earth to carry out the will of Satan.
If he says no, he is obviously lying, and he could offend part of his political base. An exit poll early in the day Tuesday showed that 53 percent of New York State Democratic primary voters call themselves liberals.
But Kerry should have had a snappy comeback, one that defused the matter. Instead, he only appeared trapped — like some harried ‘50s State Department official before Congress to answer for a list of ill-defined “un-American’’ activities.
Kerry: “Let me just ... ‘’
“Are you a liberal?’’ Bumiller interrupted.
Kerry: “Look, labels are so silly in American politics ... ‘’
Bumiller: “But Sen. Kerry, the question is ... ‘’
Now here’s the thing: The Bush team won’t want to talk about the economy. And it has to be careful about the Iraq war — because this operation has not been a clear success. And military swagger is tricky because Kerry was both a decorated military man in the Vietnam War, and later a high-profile antiwar protester. They will not want to draw comparisons between Kerry’s valor in Vietnam and Bush’s problematic record in the Air National Guard.
Solution? The Republicans will need “to push Kerry out of the center,’’ explains New York City-based political consultant Hank Sheinkopf. Their mission is to turn the Ronald Reagan Democrats against him in the lunch-pail swing states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Missouri. They must give him a liberal shellacking as they did to Dukakis.
Already, Bush has rushed to turn gay marriages from a state issue to a federal issue. Anything to draw Kerry into the line of fire.
This is not about winning the impossibly conservative Deep South. As Merle Black, Emory University political scientist, sees it, Kerry could assemble a victory without carrying one state of the old Confederacy.
But Kerry will need to sell himself as a level-headed man who is strong on defense — in spite of his anti-war past — and an innocuous fellow when it comes to the culture wars.
His mission now is to show a hard-pressed electorate in the cities of Ohio and in the hills of western Pennsylvania that he can put bread on the tables. He must do more to radiate optimism.
And if someone is so rude to call him a liberal, he had better have a smart answer handy.
