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Who is This Kerry Edwards, and What is He Running For?

Q: Are the Democrats really as stupid as they look?
A: No one is really as stupid as the Democrats look.

The first Kerry Edwards yard sign appeared on my street last week, ironically, just as the president was parlaying his Unreality TV moment into a double-digit lead in the latest Time and Newsweek polls. My first thought on seeing it was reflexive: Never heard of him.

Aside from making out in public with women who are not his wife, John Kerry has so far seized every opportunity within reach to ensure a Bush win in November. No Democratic presidential candidate since FDR in 1932 has been feted with such a rich and extensive smorgasbord of incumbent Republican disaster. And W's resume is substantially worse than Hoover's, since it includes not only domestic economic outrages (tax cuts designed for the wealthiest 1 percent, staggering deficits, worse-than-stagnant employment reports) but also a fabricated foreign invasion that has now cost over a thousand American lives as well as tens of billions of dollars, an unseemly portion of which has gone to Bush/Cheney pals in the energy sector.

The question was never whether this election would be a referendum on Bush--that was bound to be the case--but whether John Kerry and the Democrats would be the ones telling that story to the people. Here is a summary of Kerry's line on the Bush scandals:

Tax cuts: I am not a tax-and-spend liberal!

Economy: Not too good. Everyone can see that, right? But there is this offshore tax break I'd eliminate...

Iraq: I would conduct needless and immoral foreign invasions more responsibly.

Cronyism: Huh?  

It's impossible to see how diehard partisans of the Democrats can endure this campaign without learning a thing or two, but they seem to be holding up thus far. Their collective wailings and gnashings fall along two main lines: Kerry is regrettably timid, or Kerry is hewing to the "middle" to woo those fabled centrist swing voters. Indeed, some true-blue Dems (the clinically delusional ones) still rise to defend Kerry's craven non-strategy of standing back in the weeds while Bush, theoretically, sinks Bush.

There's just one trouble with all three critiques: They assume that the men and women charting the course of the Democratic party are some of the dumbest people on earth. Can they not see that this election offers dramatic and even unprecedented potential for galvanizing anti-Republican reaction and bringing new voters out of the woodwork?

Of course they can see this. They refuse to act on it because new blood would mean new demands of a very old sort on a political machine that has spent the past generation trying to rid itself of public association with "special interests," in this case meaning the people. Who needs the headache of taking them back aboard? Better to keep on flouting them and hope they will vote for you anyway, out of desperation. The voters that Democrats thereby leave on the table are their traditional base. But no more. 

But they could win so easily. Yes. So what? Given the choice between winning what might prove an unruly victory and running yet another me-too campaign that will likely lose (but without upsetting their real base, which consists largely of the same funding sources as the Republicans), they take the second path every time. The Democrats are not stupid. They are cynical. They have no interest in changing the rules of the game, and toward that end they are even more loath than Republicans to invite new people into the "process."     

Posted by Steve Perry at September 8, 2004 11:58 AM

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